Wall Street: Ukraine conflict continues to frustrate US investors

Wall Street
Ukraine conflict continues to frustrate US investors

The escalating conflict between Russia and Ukraine has continued to make investors very nervous in US stock markets.

After the long weekend, the indices got off to a robust start, but then slipped with some back and forth. In the end, the Dow Jones Industrial lost 1.42 percent to 33,596.61 points. At 33,364 points, it had meanwhile approached the January low of 33,150 points.

After almost two weeks of falling, investors remained anxious about the further development of the Ukraine conflict. The day before, Russian President Vladimir Putin had recognized the self-proclaimed People’s Republics of Luhansk and Donetsk as sovereign countries. This and a looming deployment of Russian troops in these regions now drew their waves after them. Many countries countered this with announced sanctions.

The tech-heavy Nasdaq 100, which was temporarily up in early trading, lost 0.99 percent to 13,870.53 points. The market-wide S&P 500 lost 1.01 percent to 4304.76 points.

Losses despite the DIY boom

Even if the markets were surprisingly robust in early trading, experts did not want to give the all-clear. “In the short term, this conflict represents a significant stress factor for the stock markets,” stated analyst Frank Wohlgemuth from the National Bank. In the past, political stock exchanges have often proved to be short-lived. Whether this will be the case again cannot be answered seriously. A solution to the conflict is not in sight.

On the company side, the current business development of Home Depot was the focus of investors in the Dow, which was clearly negative, to the chagrin of investors. The do-it-yourself boom brought the DIY group another record year, but the shares widened their minus to almost nine percent. The losses were justified with a meager outlook for the hardware store chain.

While shares of competitor Airbus rose in Europe, those of Boeing in New York fell almost 5 percent. Airbus announced the testing of an engine for its planned hydrogen aircraft. Boeing had recently been skeptical about this idea for future aircraft propulsion.

Meanwhile, there were significant price gains for the ketchup company Kraft Heinz, whose shares rose by five percent. Investors were encouraged here by an upgraded longer-term earnings outlook. According to the JPMorgan expert, the statements made by management at an analyst conference were generally “very optimistic”.

AMD’s shares rose 1.6 percent on the Nasdaq stock exchange. There was a rare buy recommendation from the analysts at Bernstein Research. After a break of almost ten years, an “outperform” is appropriate again, emphasized analyst Stacy Rasgon in his study. The papers of the semiconductor group are valued as cheaply as they have not been for five years.

euros stable

The shares of the US department store chain Macy’s could not defend their initially significant price gains in a generally gloomy industry environment, in the end they lost five percent. The fact that the company remained on the recovery course after the severe business slump in the corona pandemic did not help in the long term.

Meanwhile, there was a particularly large price increase for the papers of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which shot up by a good 15 percent. The financial investor Veritas Capital wants to take over the publishing company, which specializes in education and science, for 2.8 billion US dollars in cash.

The euro was quite stable. Most recently, the common currency was quoted at 1.1328 US dollars. The European Central Bank had set the reference rate at 1.1342 (Monday: 1.1338) dollars. The dollar thus cost 0.8817 (0.8820) euros

US government bonds suffered only slight price losses after the holiday break. The futures contract for ten-year Treasuries (T-Note Future) recently fell by 0.05 percent to 126.61 points. The yield on ten-year government bonds was 1.93 percent.

dpa