“Pack your bags within 72 hours. It is the message that, without too many words, the State Department sent to the Chinese Foreign Ministry on Wednesday, intimidating the closure of the Consulate of Houston, the Texas metropolis that represents one of the strong points of American technology. “We will respond appropriately soon to this senseless move” was Beijing's response.
It doesn't kick off under a lucky star the US stock market session on Wednesday, eagerly awaited because in the evening the accounts of various purebred horses of technology will come out, starting with Microsoft, the "champion of the clouds" which owes the acceleration of its cloud programs a large part of the rally (+32%) in 2020 in line with the performances of Salesforce and Adobe.
Le new tensions with Beijing will probably also weigh on analysts' response to the comforting results of Texas Instruments announced together with the guidance yesterday evening with the Stock Exchange closed: revenues attested at 3,24 billion dollars, -12% on an annual basis, against the -20% assumed by the consensus (2,95 billion). A figure destined to also affect the stock market fate of Stm, the Italian-French chip champion. Just as the strengthening of the partnership with Waymo, the Google company that deals with autonomous driving with the integration of Waymo Driver technology in the Ram ProMaster, could have an impact on the performance of Fiat Chrysler, a highly configurable platform that will allow access to a vast range of commercial customers globally.
But, beyond the barrage of daily news coming from the digital economy, the market's attention is focused on Nasdaq capacity to continue the race up after a golden semester for its leading stocks. A few numbers are enough to evaluate the state of health of the Big (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Neflix, Google and partners): Amazon it is up 89% since mid-March and 73% since the beginning of the year (on all-time highs). Great leap for too Microsoft with a +34% since the beginning of the year and +55% since March. Not least Facebook with a growth of 20% and 68% since March.
According to analysts, American high-tech brands, in addition to emerging victorious from the pandemic nightmare, will continue to play a fundamental role even post-covid as tech is increasingly connected to other sectors thanks to the adoption of robotics, the cloud computing and artificial intelligence.
The prospects remain attractive considering that companies in the sector have great financial flexibility, high cash flows and low debt. Furthermore, they are less subject to reductions in demand in contexts of economic slowdown and ensure brilliant performance even in moments of very high volatility. In this context tonight, with the stock market closed, the market will look to theTesla Matura Examination. The champion of the electric car, which has come to capitalize 290 billion dollars (more than all the car manufacturers in the USA, Germany, France, Italy and Japan) could tonight announce the fourth consecutive quarterly profit, a result that would guarantee him access to Standard & Poor's indiec.
Also for this reason, most analysts are convinced that the race of the big names in technology can still go on: “I think there is a margin of growth by at least 30% – says al Wall Street Journal Wedbush analyst Daniel Ives – even if there will be moments of uncertainty after the publication of the accounts, conditioned by the pandemic”. The concentration of purchases on a small sample of securities does not scare too much either: both Apple and Microsoft (+30% since the beginning of the year) are in a position to ensure the continuation of the increases, if only for possible buy backs.
Everything OK? Not exactly. Robinhood.com, the free platform that filled up with small shareholders/speculators, announced the indefinite postponement of the arrival in the United Kingdom for which 260 users had already registered. "The world has changed in recent months - is the explanation of the promoters of the site which is already worth 8,6 billion dollars - and we want to keep up with this change". A somewhat twisted way to absorb the shock caused by the suicide of Alex Kearns, a twenty-year-old who decided to call it quits after losing over $700 in derivatives transactions. “We are shocked” was the reaction of the site's promoters. The Nasdaq, without due precautions, can also kill.
