The performance of tech giants like Alphabet, Facebook and Amazon will dominate this week’s June quarter earnings flood in the US.
More than 170 S&P 500 companies due to release updates over the next five trading sessions.
The list includes Hasbro, Alphabet, 3M, Harley-Davidson, Lockheed Martin, AT&T, Coca-Cola, Mattel, Gilead, Visa, Ford, General Motors, McDonald’s, Starbucks, Twitter, Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Halliburton, Starbucks, Colgate Palmolive, Newmont Mining, UPS, Amazon, Boeing, Intel, AMD, Texas Instruments, Mondelez, American Airlines, Whirlpool,Comcast, ConocoPhillips, Facebook and Mastercard.
The results of Alphabet, tonight, our time and Facebook and Amazon midweek, will be the figures most anticipated by investors.
Amazon briefly joined the $US900 billion club last week becoming only the second company after iPhone maker Apple to cross that milestone. Its value ended the week on $US880 billion.
Apple reports next week. Its value ended last week on $US941 billion.
The weaker than expected figures and forecast from Netflix last week saw its shares end the week down nearly 9% and the value finished at $US157 billion. Netflix shares corrected during the week and are down more than 12% so far in July.
Apple shares are up a modest 3.5% this month so far and Amazon shares have risen 5.7%.
Alphabet shares are up 2.5% so far in july but fellb0.3% last week while Facebook shares are continuing to enjoy good times – up 1.2% for the week and 4% for the month so far.
Meanwhile US stocks basically went nowhere very slowly last week.
Friday’s session on Wall Street saw shares finish much where they started the session and the week as President Trump’s increasingly erratic behaviour and comments on Russia, trade, US interest rates and the value of the greenback, whacked investor confidence.
The Dow lost 6.38 points, or less than 0.1%, to end at 25,058. The S&P 500 index eased 2.66 points, or about 0.1%, to 2,801.83 and the Nasdaq which has an outsize exposure to large tech stocks, finished the session down 5.10 points, or less than 0.1%, at 7,820.20.
That was ahead of the flood of quarterly earnings this week that will by dominated by megatechs, Alphabet (Google, Facebook and Amazon).
For the week, the Dow rose 0.2%, the S&P added less than 0.1% and the Nasdaq eased by less than 0.1%, which was enough to end two successive weekly gains.
