The Stock Market At Close – Wednesday, March 22
The Toronto Market
The big news item driving the market today was the interest rate hike announced by Federal Reserve Chairman at the conclusion of Federal Reserve Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting today. The good news is that the amount of the hike was as largely expected. The announcement also indicated that the regime of interest rate hikes may soon be coming to an end.
The TSX index declined -122.14 points, or -0.6%, to close at 19,532.78.
Among the TSX sectors, the energy group declined 1.4%. The financials declined, falling 0.8%, while technology ended 1.1% lower. The materials group, which includes precious and base metals miners and fertilizer companies climbed 0.8% as the price of gold rose.
The US Markets
The US markets suffered a broad based decline today. The three major U.S. stock indexes ended the session sharply lower today. The decline came after the U.S. Federal Reserve delivered a widely expected 25 basis point hike, while hinting that it was on the verge of pausing future increases in view of recent turmoil in the financial sector. All the three indexes were off more than 1.6%.
In the Fed’s statement, the members of the Federal Open Markets Committee (FOMC) said some additional tightening might be possible, but suggested it was on the verge of pausing future hikes.
The sell-off was exacerbated by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s remarks before lawmakers that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) was not considering “blanket insurance” for deposits arising from recent strife in the sector.
The Dow Jones index declined -530.49 points, or -1.63%, to close at 32,030.11. The S&P 500 declined -65.9 points, or -1.65%, to close at 3,936.97. The Nasdaq Composite declined -190.15 points, or -1.6%, to close the market session at 11,669.96. Declining issues outnumbered advancing issues on the NYSE by a 2.25-to-1 ratio. The ratio of declining stocks to advancing stocks on the Nasdaq was 2.57-to-1.
All 11 major sectors of the S&P 500 ended the session deep in the red, with real estate suffering the steepest percentage drop, its largest one-day plunge since Sept. 13.
The banking sector lost ground today. The banks had appeared to be recovering having gained on Monday and yesterday. The S&P Banks index and the KBW Regional Bank index declined -3.7% and -5.3%, respectively.
Shares of First Republic declined -15.5% in volatile trade.
Oil and the money markets: U.S. crude oil futures settled 1.8% higher at $70.90 a barrel. The U.S. dollar declined and that helped to prop up oil prices.
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Stocks In The News/ Stocks To Watch
Arista Networks (NYSE:ANET) today introduced the Arista WAN Routing System, which combines three new networking offerings: enterprise-class routing platforms, carrier/cloud-neutral internet transit capabilities, and the CloudVision(R) Pathfinder Service to simplify and improve customer wide area networks. Based on Arista’s EOS(R) routing capabilities, and CloudVision management, the Arista WAN Routing System delivers the architecture, features, and platforms to modernize federated and software-defined wide area networks.
Supermicro, Inc. (NASDAQ: SMCI), a total IT solution provider for Cloud, AI/ML, Storage, and 5G/Edge, announced the first in a line of powerful yet quiet and power-efficient NVIDIA-accelerated AI Development platforms which gives information professionals and developers the most powerful technology available today at their deskside. Super Micro Computer stock has largely ignored the banking turmoil of last week.
Nvidia Corp’s (NVDA) Chief Executive Jensen Huang said today that generative artificial intelligence will grow from a “single digit” portion of the company’s revenue in the past year to a “quite large” portion of its revenue in the coming year.
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Regular Market Day Features
Beginner Investor’s (Canadian stocks) Watchlist
The Canadian banks were largely down today bringing to an end the two consecutive sessions of gains.
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The Canadian Vanguard Chinese Stocks Watchlist
EV, Energy and Resource Stocks Watchlist at Today’s Market
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