- The Dow Jones shed half of a percent amid cautious market flows.
- The midweek market session has investors looking ahead to US PCE inflation.
- China GDP downgrade has investors concerned about physical trade.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) trimmed near-term gains on Wednesday, backsliding 200 points in the midweek market session. A downgrade to China’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) forecast has investors concerned about a possible overhang in global trade, but most of the market is buckling down for the wait to Friday’s US Personal Consumption Expenditure Price Index (PCE) inflation print.
Equities pared back across the board after UBS trimmed its forecasts of Chinese GDP growth in 2024 and 2025. The Fitch ratings agency also issued a warning about performance in several of China’s business sectors in the second half of 2024 in a double-punch to market expectations of Chinese growth forecasts.
According to UBS, Chinese GDP growth is expected to clock in at 4.6% for 2024 compared to the previous expectation of 4.9%, and its 2025 forecast has been shifted down to just 4.0% from 4.6%. From Fitch Ratings, China’s ongoing property development slump is expected to remain a drag on issuers across several sectors, crimping growth and activity prospects in a measurable way through the last half of the year.
This week, investors will be closely watching Friday’s US PCE Price Index inflation reading for July. It is anticipated that YoY PCE inflation will increase to 2.7% from the current 2.6%, while the MoM figure is expected to remain unchanged at 0.2%. Those who are anticipating a reduction in interest rates will be looking for the inflation data to be lower than anticipated. However, if the inflation data exceeds expectations, it could unsettle investor sentiment and throw a wrench in current rate cut forecasts.
Dow Jones news
Tepid risk appetite on Wednesday has most of the Dow Jones in the red for the midweek market session. Gains are being led by Merck & Co Inc. (MRK), which rose around 0.6% to $163.90 per share, while Nike (NKE) fell 3.5% to $82.30 per share.
The moment is almost here. Despite a number of showstopping earnings calls this season, everyone has been waiting for Nvidia (NVDA) to release fiscal 2025 Q2 results, which finally arrive after the closing bell on Wednesday.
Dow Jones price forecast
The Dow Jones’ midweek pullback is picking up speed, with the equity index backsliding nine-tenths of one percent and shedding over 350 points. The DJIA has once again fallen below the 41,000 handle as near-term bullish momentum takes a pause and overextended price action snaps lower.
With bullish pressure running out of gas near fresh all-time highs beyond 41,250, bids are poised for an extended backslide to the 50-day Exponential Moving Average (EMA) rising through 40,000. Despite a near-term crimp in bidding momentum, short positions in the Dow Jones are unlikely to find a clear path all the way back to the index’s last major swing low below 38,500.
Dow Jones daily chart
Nvidia FAQs
Nvidia is the leading fabless designer of graphics processing units or GPUs. These sophisticated devices allow computers to better process graphics for display interfaces by accelerating computer memory and RAM. This is especially true in the world of video games, where Nvidia graphics cards became a mainstay of the industry. Additionally, Nvidia is well-known as the creator of its CUDA API that allows developers to create software for a number of industries using its parallel computing platform. Nvidia chips are leading products in the data center, supercomputing and artificial intelligence industries. The company is also viewed as one of the inventors of the system-on-a-chip design.
Current CEO Jensen Huang founded Nvidia with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem in 1993. All three founders were semiconductor engineers, who had previously worked at AMD, Sun Microsystems, IBM and Hewlett-Packard. The team set out to build more proficient GPUs than currently existed in the market and largely succeeded by late 1990s. The company was founded with $40,000 but secured $20 million in funding from Sequoia Capital venture fund early on. Nvidia went public in 1999 under the ticker NVDA. Nvidia became a leading designer of chips to the data center, PC, automotive and mobile markets through its close relationship with Taiwan Semiconductor.
In 2022, Nvidia released its ninth-generation data center GPU called the H100. This GPU is specifically designed with the needs of artificial intelligence applications in mind. For instance, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and GPT-4 large language models (LLMs) rely on the H100’s high efficiency in parallel processing to execute a high number of commands quickly. The chip is said to speed up networks by six times Nvidia’s previous A100 chip and is based on the new Hopper architecture. The H100 chip contains 80 billion transistors. Nvidia’s market cap reached $1 trillion in May 2023 largely on the promise of its H100 chip becoming the “picks and shovels” of the coming AI revolution.
Long-time CEO Jense Huang has a cult following in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street due to his strict loyalty and determination to build Nvidia into one of the world’s leading companies. Nvidia neary fell apart on several occasions, but each time Huang bet everything on a new technology that turned out to be the ticket to the company’s success. Huang is seen as a visionary in Silicon Valley, and his company is at the forefront of most major breakthroughs in computer processing. Huang is known for his enthusiastic keynote addresses at annual Nvidia GTC conferences, as well as his love of black leather jackets and Denny’s, the fast food chain where the company was founded.
Source: https://www.fxstreet.com/news/dow-jones-industrial-average-trims-back-on-cautious-wednesday-202408281826