Midday: U.S. stocks maintain gains Technology stocks led the gains

In the early morning of the 28th Beijing time, U.S. stocks maintained their rally at noon on Tuesday, led by technology stocks. The Dow could halt its six-day losing streak. The second quarter and the first half of the trading session came to an end. Investors pay attention to the latest economic data and Fed policy movements.

The Dow rose 145.92 points, or 0.43%, to 33,860.63, the NASDAQ added 133.49 points, or 1.00%, to 13,469.27 and the S&P 500 gained 30.33 points, or 0.70%, to 4,359.15.

U.S. stocks closed lower on Monday, with technology leading the decline, with the Nasdaq down nearly 1.2%. Tesla fell more than 6 percent, its biggest one-day drop since late January. Shares of Nvidia, Alphabet and Meta Platforms fell more than 3%.

Despite Monday's closing lower, both the S&P 500 and NASDAQ are up more than 3% so far in June, and the Dow is up nearly 2.5%.

This week marks the end of the second quarter and the first half of the year. The S&P 500 and Dow are up 5% and 1%, respectively, so far in the second quarter.

The Nasdaq is up more than 9% so far in the second quarter and will record its best first-half performance in nearly 40 years.

Since the beginning of this year, the AI investment boom has pushed the stock prices of large U.S. technology companies to record highs, and the Nasdaq 100 index, the bellwether of technology stocks, has risen by more than 35%, and has already entered a technical bull market.

Jim Bianco, president and macro strategist at Bianco Research, said artificial intelligence (AI) stocks may not be profitable in the future because investors have already made money from this year's rally. ”

Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, who is known as the "majority of technology stocks", believes that U.S. technology stocks are preparing for a long-term uptrend, and he expects technology stocks to rise 12% to 15% in the second half of this year, which is an increase from his previous expectation of 10-12%.

The analyst said tech companies could spend hundreds of billions of dollars in the AI gold rush, which could trigger continued gains in U.S. tech stocks in the second half of the year.

But last week, after hawkish statements by Fed Chairman Jerome Powell in Congress stressing that the Fed will raise interest rates twice this year, the market's bets on the Fed's interest rate cut this year began to fade, and recession expectations rose, especially economic indicators such as manufacturing PMIs. As a result, the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq 100 ended down last week, and the S&P 500 failed to close for six consecutive weeks.

Scott Ladner, CIO at Horizon Investments, said: "It's not uncommon for trends that have been going on throughout the quarter to begin to reverse at the end of the quarter. The fact that small-cap stocks are doing well today and the Nasdaq is underperforming may also reflect the portfolio adjustment effect at the end of the quarter. ”

The world's major central bank governors gathered in Sintra, Portugal, on Tuesday for the European Central Bank's annual central bank meeting. The conference brought together central bankers, academics, financial market officials and others to exchange views on current policy issues.

Speeches by the governors of the central banks of the United States, Europe, the United Kingdom and Japan will be closely watched, especially after Fed Chairman Jerome Powell reiterated that further rate hikes are expected this year. While U.S. inflation has been falling, it remains well above the Fed's 2 percent target, and tech stocks and rate-sensitive sectors have come under pressure since he testified to Congress last week.

Lagarde's speech in Sintra, Portugal, heightened fears that central banks would continue to push up interest rates, causing a reversal of fragile economies. Lagarde said that inflation in the eurozone is too high and will continue to raise interest rates in July; It is unlikely that the central bank will announce that interest rates have peaked.

While markets are accepting the idea that the Fed won't cut rates this year, many believe the recession could be relatively shallow and the damage to corporate earnings won't be as great as expected.

"So far, the economy has gained good momentum," said Mark Dowding, chief investment officer at BlueBay Asset Management, "and as central banks' rate hike cycles come to a close, this gives hope of a relatively soft landing without a deeper recession." ”

On Tuesday's economic data, the US durable goods orders index for May rose 1.7% month-on-month, -1.00% expected, and 1.10% previously.

In the United States, the S&P/Case Schiller 20 major cities price index fell 1.7% year-on-year in April, down 2.6% expected and down 1.15% in the previous month.

US Richmond Fed Manufacturing Index -7 for June, -12 expected, -15 prior.

U.S. new home sales annualized in May were 12.2% m/m vs -1.20% expected vs. 4.10% prior.

Focus stocks

JPMorgan Chase & Co. U.S. Treasury clients posted their highest net long position since 2010.

Robinhood will lay off about 7 percent of its full-time employees, or about 150 people.

Motorcom lowered TSMC's profit forecast due to slowing terminal demand.

Ford began a new round of layoffs, involving three major divisions in North America.

"Wooden sister" Casey Wood continued to reduce her position in Tesla and buy AMD and TSMC.

Microsoft's CEO set a goal a year ago: $500 billion in revenue in fiscal 2030.

Amazon Web Services will invest nearly $7.8 billion more in Ohio to expand its data center business.

Thomson Reuters will buy legal artificial intelligence company Casetext for $650 million.

According to Li Auto's WeChat public account, sales this month reached 27,300 units, and the monthly sales target of 30,000 vehicles is about to be achieved.

According to a research report published by Bank of America analyst Justin Post, after surveying more than 1,100 American netizens aged 18 to 55, 59% of respondents would use ChatGPT, 51% would use Bing, and 34% would use Bard.

Sam Altman, OpenAI's chief executive, told some developers privately that OpenAI seeks to turn ChatGPT into a "super-intelligent office personal assistant" that can perform tasks such as drafting emails or documents in a particular user's style.

U.S. electric car startup Lordstown Motors filed for bankruptcy protection in Delaware, announcing the launch of the sale process and suing Hon Hai. In a complaint filed with bankruptcy court, Lordstown accused Hon Hai of fraud and reneging on its promise to invest $170 million in the electric car maker.

At the Shanghai station of the JD Cloud City Conference, Cao Peng, chairman of the technical committee of JD.com Group and president of JD.com Cloud Business Unit, introduced that the upcoming large-scale pre-trained language model of Yanxi is a new generation model with hundreds of billions of parameters.

Wang Haifeng, chief technology officer of Baidu, said that one of the biggest changes in Wenxin Model 3.5 is the new plug-in mechanism, and the default built-in plug-in "Baidu Search" makes Wenxin have the ability to generate real-time accurate information; Long text summaries and Q&A plugin "ChatFile" support super long text input and much more.

U.S. battery maker Envix announced an order to produce batteries for the U.S. military.

Xiaoi Robot plans to release the Xiaoi large model on June 29.