Wall Street closes unevenly and Meta stock collapses

The New York stock market ended unevenly on Thursday, with the Nasdaq suffering from the black day of Meta (Facebook) that collapsed, while the Dow Jones managed to stay afloat thanks to defensive actions, less sensitive to the situation.

(The giant Amazon registered losses of 3,000 million dollars).

The Dow Jones gained 0.61% to 32,033.27 points, for its fifth consecutive rise. While, the technological Nasdaq lost 1.63% to 10,792.67 unitsand the expanded S&P 500 index 0.61% to 3,807.30 points.

The day was marked by the collapse of Meta, which makes up about 3% of the Nasdaq. Its stock lost 24.56% to its lowest level since January 2016. In one year, the Menlo Park (California) group lost almost 600,000 million dollars of market capitalization.

Meta announced on Wednesday after the closing of the stock market, a new drop in its quarterly billing, in this case of 4% for the third quarter compared to the same period last year. This is the second consecutive quarterly decline for Mark Zuckerberg’s firm. Faced with economic difficulties in the world, many advertisers cut their marketing budgets and this affects companies that derive the bulk of their income from Internet advertising, such as Meta.

(Oil prices continue to rise and Brent is approaching US$100).

The fall of the Facebook parent company dragged down the entire technology sector and other giants such as Apple (-3.05%), Amazon (-4.06%) or Alphabet (Google, -2.34%) also gave way. US online commerce giant Amazon released results at the close of business on Thursday. It reported a 9% contraction in its net profits in the third quarter compared to the same period last year, as well as lower-than-expected sales.

The market reacted very poorly to these numbers, with Amazon stock down more than 19% in after-hours electronic trading. While, Apple exceeded market expectations with 90,000 million dollars in sales and 20.7 billion net profit in the third quarter, but sales of the iPhone, its flagship product, disappointed the market.

In the fourth quarter of its fiscal year, the third of the year, the Californian group sold smartphones for 42.6 billion dollars, below the 43 billion expected by analysts. Its shares slipped slightly in off-hours electronic trading on Wall Street.

The Dow Jones, meanwhile, remained stoic thanks to the resistance of defensive stocks sought after in a period of economic slowdown, which, for the most part, had satisfactory results. This is the case of the Caterpillar machinery group (+7.71% to 212.14 dollars) or the cable operator Comcast (+1.49% to 31.97 dollars).

Meanwhile, Twitter gained 0.66% to $53.70 to stay close to the price per share proposed by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, to buy the social network, a deal that should be completed on Friday. McDonald’s (+3.31% to $265.11) benefited from better-than-expected results.

AFP