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A woman in a face mask passes the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on February 3, 2020 on Wall Street in New York City.
Johannes Eisele | AFP | fake pictures
Stock futures fell sharply on Thursday night as traders analyzed the latest batch of big tech gains after Wall Street closed its best month in decades.
Dow Jones Industrial Average futures were trading 289 points lower, implying a Friday opening drop of approximately 249 points. S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 futures also pointed to Friday’s opening falls for the two indices.
Apple reported quarterly earnings that exceeded analyst expectations, but its revenue growth held steady year-over-year. Additionally, the company did not offer guidance for the quarter ending June amid uncertainty about the coronavirus outbreak. Shares of the technology giant traded more than 2% lower in after-hours operations.
Amazon, another tech giant, saw its shares drop 4.8% in trade after hours after announcing plans to spend all of its second-quarter earnings on its response to the coronavirus. The e-commerce giant also posted a first-quarter profit that fell short of analyst expectations.
Both Apple and Amazon are among the companies that led the return of the S&P 500 from the lows in late March and were two of the best in April. Amazon recovered almost 27% in April, while Apple increased 15.3%.
“Dependence on a handful of stocks has masked widespread weakness in the past, and if they fail, they may obscure overall improvements in the future,” Willie Delwiche, investment strategist at Baird, said in a note.
Wall Street was coming out of its biggest monthly increase in more than 30 years, with the S&P 500 gaining 12.7% while the Dow advanced 11.1%. It was the third-largest monthly gain for the S&P 500 since World War II. The Nasdaq Composite closed 15.5% higher in April, posting its biggest one-month gain since June 2000.
Those gains were fueled in part by hope for a possible treatment for the coronavirus. Earlier in the week, Gilead Sciences said a study of its remdesivir drug by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases met its primary goal.
The number of new infections worldwide has also decreased in recent weeks, leading to some countries and states in the US. USA To slowly reopen their economies.
But Phillip Colmar and Santiago Espinosa, strategists at MRB Partners, urged investors to be cautious.
“The strong recovery in equities has now overtaken underlying fundamentals, leaving room for short-term disappointment,” they said in a note to clients. “Many authorities seek to reopen their economies, but to do so safely and close to past production levels will require a series of medical advances and a widespread distribution of treatment.”
According to Johns Hopkins University, more than 3.2 million virus cases have been confirmed worldwide, with more than 1 million infections in the US alone. USA
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