Wall Street up, with the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite both testing new record values. The Dow Jones rose 0.22% to 34,654 points, the S&P 500 advanced 0.28% to 4,356. The Nasdaq Composite gained 0.45% at 14,729 points.
Highlights are the increases of Apple + 1.51% and Amazon which, in the last month, have risen by a double-digit percentage, compared to the + 2.8% gain of the S&P 500 index. holding company headed by Google, and especially Amazon, jumped by almost 5% in yesterday’s session.
Amazon is seen special today, alongside Microsoft, after the US Department of Justice announced the cancellation of the $ 10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure Cloud (JEDI) contract awarded in 2019 by Microsoft.
Amazon immediately opposed the Pentagon’s choice, and the following month its AWS cloud computing unit filed a lawsuit in the US Federal Appeals Court. The giant explained that the Pentagon had been influenced by the hostile attitude that then US President Donald Trump had shown towards the group and its then CEO Jeff Bezos.
Yesterday, the announcement by the US Defense to cancel that contract. The official explanation is that “due to the progress of the industry, the JEDI Cloud contract no longer meets the needs”.
As a result, the Pentagon will launch the new Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability contract. Both Amazon and Microsoft have been urged to submit new proposals.
Immediately after the news, Microsoft lost 0.5%, while Amazon flew over + 4%, testing a new record value.
However, Microsoft recovers 0.57%, while Amazon moves up by more than 1%.
Among the securities, attention also to the banks, with the prices of the giants Goldman Sachs -0.67% and JP Morgan at the moment flat, after yesterday’s negative session, in which they discounted the sharp drop in rates on ten-year Treasuries, capitulated up at 1.35%, the lowest since February. The decline sank hopes of a recovery in profitability for the banking sector, fueled by the expectation of higher interest rates.
In this regard, waiting for the minutes of the FOMC, the monetary policy arm of the Fed, which will be announced today, and which relate to the last meeting of the American central bank on June 16-17, which ended with a tone more hawkish.
From the dot plot – a document that indicates the expectations of each member of the FOMC – it emerged that the expectations of the US central bank are, on average, of two rate hikes in 2023. The Fed has, moreover, revised its growth estimates upwards inflation at + 3.4% this year, well above the + 2.4% expected in the previous outlook.
The focus is always on the trend in oil prices, after the decision of OPEC + to cancel the meeting, due to the inability to reach an agreement with the United Arab Emirates, which basically ask that the starting threshold for the determination of the production quota is revised upwards, in order to produce more.
The fact that the meeting was canceled means that even the increase in supply of 400,000 barrels per day starting from August, which had been proposed by the OPEC + alliance, has not been decided: bullish factor for oil prices, so much so that WTI flew up to $ 76.98 yesterday, a six-year record since November 2014, while Brent rose to its highest level since October 2018, at 77.84.
However, the wild buy yesterday always left the place to strong sells, which sank the Brent by over -3% yesterday, causing the WTI to fall by over -2%.
Currently, WTI is up 0.78% to $ 73.94 per barrel, while Brent is up 0.71% to $ 75.06 per barrel.