Wall Street rallied on Friday, led higher by Apple and Microsoft ahead of their March quarter results this week as investors wrapped a week again dominated by COVD-19 and the enormous disruption to global oil markets.
The volatile week for oil and confusion over relaxing COVID-19 lockdowns saw share markets pull back over the last week and not helped by very poor economic data from the US, UK, and Europe.
However, the falls were relatively mild compared to the 20% plus rally from the March 23 low point.
For the week US shares fell 1.3%, Eurozone shares fell 1.8%, Japanese shares fell 3.2% and Chinese shares lost 1.1%. Australian shares slid down 4.5%.
Bond yields fell in the US and Japan, were flat in Germany and rose slightly in Australia. Oil, metals and iron ore prices fell and the Australian dollar was little changed over the week, ending just under 64 US cents.
On Wall Street, the Dow jumped 1.11% to end at 23,775.27 points, while the S&P 500 was up 1.39% to 2,836.74. The Nasdaq added 1.65% to 8,634.52.
For the week, the S&P 500 fell 1.3%, the Dow lost 1.9% and the Nasdaq lost 0.2%.
Australian shares were dragged down by 4.5% by the poor global lead with energy shares down again but the biggest falls were actually in property, industrial, retail and health stocks.
Overnight trading on the futures market showed an 8 point gain after the rises on Wall Street. Eurozone shares fell 1.3% on Friday but the US S&P 500 had a good day Friday.
The big event for the ASX this week will be the release of profits from the ANZ Bank (interim) and Macquarie (full year) on Thursday, along with March quarter figures for local tech giants, Resmed and Atlassian.
Amazon and Apple shares rose 0.45% and 2.9% respectively on Friday. Amazon reports on Thursday, Apple on Tuesday.
So far this year Apple shares are off 3.6% (it has warned twice of the probable impact of the closure of stores globally and weak sales in China) while Amazon shares have surged 30% because it has emerged as one of the most important companies in the era of a COVID-19 lockdown. Microsoft shares are up 10.7%. The S&P 500 is down 12% year to date.
Boeing shares fell more than 6% after a report the planemaker was planning to cut 787 Dreamliner production by about half. Boeing shares are down 60% year to date.
Even with Friday’s gains, the S&P 500 ended the week lower, with investors fearful of a deep economic slump following a near-crash in April business activity and weekly jobless claims topping 26 million in five weeks.
The index has recovered more than 25% from its March low and expectations are growing that more businesses will be allowed to reopen as coronavirus infections showed signs of peaking.
