Wall Street ended with small gain for the Dow and small losses for the S&P 500 and Nasdaq on a day when the flow of news was unremittingly bad, especially economic.
Another jump in jobless claims, record lows for surveys of service sector activity across major regions, with weak manufacturing reports as well, and bad news on a much-touted coronavirus vaccine.
Shares trimmed or erased early gains in a choppy trading session on Thursday to post a mixed finish. That hit Australian overnight ASX 200 futures which were showing a modest gain of fewer than 10 points at 6.20 am.
US shares lost ground after a news report (in the Financial Times) said that an experimental treatment for COVID-19 delivered disappointing results in a trial.
The maker of the treatment, Gilead Science later said the trial results for remdesivir were “inconclusive.” The FT said the results, loaded onto the World Health Organisation website, showed it didn’t work.
The data was later taken down, but it put a bit of a dampener on the day for the eager beavers on Wall Street.
The Dow rose around 39.44 points, or 0.2%, to end at 23,515.26; the S&P 500 lost around 1.51 points, or 0.1%, to end near 2,798.80 The Nasdaq fell less than 0.1% to end near 8,495.75. Gilead Sciences shares fell 4.3%.
Wall Street didn’t blink at the news that more than 4.4 million Americans had made their first jobless benefits claim, taking the total for the past five weeks to more than 26 million and wiping out the 22 million new jobs created in the biggest jobs boom in US history.
That news was out before trading started and the market took the terrible news in its stride.
The IHS Market flash purchasing managers index (PMI) for US services in April fell to a record low at 27, while the manufacturing PMI weakened to 36.9, the lowest level in 11 years.
The US service sector saw the worst of it as the PMI reading fell to 27.0 in April, marking the quickest contraction on record.
Similar surveys in Europe, Japan, the UK, and Australia showed a similar outcome with record lows for the services sector PMIs
The Australian survey results and the record low for service sector activity made have crimped the day for Australian shares on Thursday. They slid for a fourth session weighed down by weakness in banks and healthcare providers.
The ASX 200 fell 4.1 points, or 0.1%, at 5217.1, after being up more than 1% in early trade.
