I require that the article come from the Business, Economy, or Finance sections of the WSJ site, that the article itself be 3 or more paragraphs long, and that it be no older than the start of this semester (pick an article that was published). Try to find something that interests you, and then apply the lessons you’ve learned over the course of the semester.
As you prepare the article, please try to incorporate answers to the following questions:
If the article is about the performance of a company or a product, what do you think about the future performance of the company/product (i.e., what are you expecting will be the financial impact)?
If the article is about a development in the financial world, what implications does it have for the US economy and/or the world economy?
Why did you choose the article?
What is your opinion of the article overall? Was anything confusing about the article?
Do you feel that topics covered in this class helped you with understanding the article?
Overall, this is a chance for you to demonstrate a bit about what you’ve learned so far in the course. Take advantage of that by finding a finance news topic that interests you and then really diving deep into it. Remember what I said at the beginning of the course: finance is a vast, vast world; the key is often to find that subject that really interests you and then to dive in.
2 pages
Israel and Iran
appear to be trying to calm tensions after trading military blows in recent days. Markets aren’t getting the message.
An Israeli strike late Thursday night led to a brief spike in oil prices, rattling investors before the opening bell Friday morning in New York. That added momentum to a pullback in the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite that saddled both with their longest daily losing streak in more than a year.
By the time the closing bell rang Friday afternoon, the tech-heavy Nasdaq had racked up a 5.5% weekly decline, its worst such performance since 2022. The S&P 500 dropped 3.1% for the week, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average eked out a tiny gain.
The Nasdaq and S&P 500 have both declined in each of the past three weeks as a stronger-than-expected U.S. economy buoys inflation and scrambles Wall Street
forecasts for interest-rate cuts by the Federal Reserve. Those changing expectations are hammering the speculative artificial-intelligence-oriented tech stocks that propelled a market rally in recent months.
A frothy oil market has added another high-risk variable to investors’ outlook. After Israel targeted an area not far from an Iranian air base and nuclear facilities Thursday night, benchmark global crude prices quickly jumped from less than $87 a barrel to nearly $91 a barrel.
“Things were looking a little wild,” said Matt Thompson, a co-portfolio manager at Little Harbor Advisors.
Oil traders retreated almost as quickly when reports trickled out suggesting that the Israeli strikes appeared to be narrow in scope. Front-month Brent crude closed Friday with a pedestrian 0.2% gain, to $87.29 a barrel. Still, it was enough to give a 1.1% boost to the S&P 500 energy sector, the only vertical in the index that has advanced this month.
Thompson’s firm runs exchange-traded funds that shield clients from market swings by buying futures linked to the Cboe Volatility Index, or VIX, a measure of traders’ expectations of stock-market turbulence. As anxiety around a Middle East war pushed up crude prices in recent weeks, firms such as Little Harbor have snapped up those contracts as a hedge against the fallout of a potential oil shock that could ripple through the economy.
If the correlation between crude prices and Wall Street’s so-called fear gauge were to break down, Thompson said, “that would be a good sign for the market. Then we’d just move back to the wet-blanket narrative, the Fed.”
That narrative continued Friday, when Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee said at a conference that “progress on inflation has stalled.” The yield on 10-year Treasurys, which tends to rise and fall alongside investors’ interest-rate expectations, settled slightly lower at 4.613%.
A run-up in yields in recent weeks has turned tech stocks, the big winners in previous months, into major losers. The so-called Magnificent 7 stocks lost a collective $950 billion in market capitalization this week, according to Dow Jones Market Data, their largest weekly loss on record. Other AI darlings, including Intel,
Qualcomm and
Advanced Micro Devices, similarly skidded.
Those companies also weighed down major indexes Friday, when
Nvidia slumped 10%. The Nasdaq fell 2.1%. The S&P 500 veered 0.9% lower. Boosted by financial firms and consumer staples, the Dow rose 0.6%, or 211 points.
American Express was the blue-chip index’s best performer, rising 6.2%, after reporting better-than-expected profits and an acceleration in new-card sign-ups. In a sign that Americans are continuing to shop freely, U.S. cardholders also ramped up spending from a year earlier.
UnitedHealth Group climbed 1.6%, finishing the week up 14% after its earnings beat Wall Street’s expectations. The company is one value stock bought by Scott Duba, chief investment officer at Prime Capital Investment Advisors, in a push toward firms that are more insulated from economic shifts or higher interest rates.
