- The Dow Jones is looking to pare recent losses, but topside momentum remains limited.
- Investors are pivoting out of popular tech rally favorites, dragging equity markets lower.
- The Dow is keeping on-balance as investors rotate into non-tech darlings.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) skirted Monday’s broad-market declines as investors gave a second thought to their bullish outlook on the long-run tech sector rally. The Dow gained roughly 300 points to kick off the trading week, while the other major equity indexes shed weight.
Investor hopes for continued rate cuts from the Federal Reserve (Fed) have been swirling the drain since the start of the new trading year, and last Friday’s bumper Nonfarm Payrolls (NFP) sealed the deal on the Fed being in no rush to deliver more rate reductions. With a bumping US workforce and inflation pressures continuing to simmer in the background, there is little reason for the Fed to race into further moves on rates. To their credit, Fed policymakers have been warning markets for over a year that neutral rates have definitely moved higher since the pandemic and near-zero rate days of the early 2010s, and now it looks like that fact is finally taking hold in investors’ minds.
A fresh batch of US inflation figures are due this week: US Producer Price Index (PPI) inflation is due on Tuesday, and the Consumer Price Index (CPI) is slated for Wednesday. Both figures are expected to tick upwards in the near term, which could further undermine rate cut hopes. Retail Sales figures for December will land on Thursday, and the figure is expected to shift lower but remain in healthy consumer spending territory.
Dow Jones news
Despite a broad-market pullback out of tech stock, over half of the Dow Jones is testing into the high side on Monday, with gains being led by a fresh bout of bidding in Unitedhealth Group (UNH), which is recovering from a December bear run that dragged the health sector stock down from record highs above $600. UNH is up over 4% at the time of writing, breaking above $543 per share.
On the low side, Nvidia (NVDA) just can’t catch a break, declining another 2.3% and trading south of $133 per share. Forecasters of tech sector stocks, which are hinged entirely around the AI tech craze, have decided that Nvidia will miss out on future earnings in the AI space as competitors sweep in and take market share from the chipmaker. The fact that the AI tech space is entirely dependent on a massive pipeline of investment funds with little to no revenue to speak of is only a minor factor as traders focus on companies situated to service the exorbitant spending habits of large-scale data modelers driving the AI space.
The US is also expected to further curb exports of Nvidia-produced silicon wafers in a bid to limit market access to high-grade computing chips by foreign opponents to the US, further crimping Nvidia flows. Further adding to Nvidia’s issues, a “glitchy” server rack problem is leading the usual NVDA customers to hold off on large-scale acquisitions of server computing solutions until Nvidia is able to push a newer version, crimping near-term sales of business services.
Dow Jones price forecast
The Dow Jones is catching a thin bid on Monday, pushing back upwards after a decline into the 42,000 handle. The major equity index has drifted nearly 7.5% top-to-bottom into the bearish side after tapping record peaks just above 45,000.
Despite recent bear moves, the Dow Jones is still holding north of the 200-day Exponential Moving Average (EMA), but only just. The Dow is due for a bit of a breather after outpacing the long-run moving average since November of 2023, and closing in the green for ten of the last thirteen straight months.
Dow Jones daily chart
Nvidia FAQs
Nvidia is the leading fabless designer of graphics processing units or GPUs. These sophisticated devices allow computers to better process graphics for display interfaces by accelerating computer memory and RAM. This is especially true in the world of video games, where Nvidia graphics cards became a mainstay of the industry. Additionally, Nvidia is well-known as the creator of its CUDA API that allows developers to create software for a number of industries using its parallel computing platform. Nvidia chips are leading products in the data center, supercomputing and artificial intelligence industries. The company is also viewed as one of the inventors of the system-on-a-chip design.
Current CEO Jensen Huang founded Nvidia with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem in 1993. All three founders were semiconductor engineers, who had previously worked at AMD, Sun Microsystems, IBM and Hewlett-Packard. The team set out to build more proficient GPUs than currently existed in the market and largely succeeded by late 1990s. The company was founded with $40,000 but secured $20 million in funding from Sequoia Capital venture fund early on. Nvidia went public in 1999 under the ticker NVDA. Nvidia became a leading designer of chips to the data center, PC, automotive and mobile markets through its close relationship with Taiwan Semiconductor.
In 2022, Nvidia released its ninth-generation data center GPU called the H100. This GPU is specifically designed with the needs of artificial intelligence applications in mind. For instance, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and GPT-4 large language models (LLMs) rely on the H100’s high efficiency in parallel processing to execute a high number of commands quickly. The chip is said to speed up networks by six times Nvidia’s previous A100 chip and is based on the new Hopper architecture. The H100 chip contains 80 billion transistors. Nvidia’s market cap reached $1 trillion in May 2023 largely on the promise of its H100 chip becoming the “picks and shovels” of the coming AI revolution. In June 2024, Nvidia’s market capitalization crossed the $3 trillion mark.
Long-time CEO Jense Huang has a cult following in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street due to his strict loyalty and determination to build Nvidia into one of the world’s leading companies. Nvidia neary fell apart on several occasions, but each time Huang bet everything on a new technology that turned out to be the ticket to the company’s success. Huang is seen as a visionary in Silicon Valley, and his company is at the forefront of most major breakthroughs in computer processing. Huang is known for his enthusiastic keynote addresses at annual Nvidia GTC conferences, as well as his love of black leather jackets and Denny’s, the fast food chain where the company was founded.
Read the full article here