On Wall Street, the S&P 500 barely budged and inched up by less than 0.1 per cent, coming off its first loss in four days. It remains near its all-time high set earlier this week. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 270 points, or 0.6 per cent, and the Nasdaq composite fell 0.4 per cent.
This muted showing masked some big swings underneath the surface, including for makers of weapons and other military equipment after US President Donald Trump said he wanted to increase spending on them to $1.5 trillion in 2027 from $901 billion in order to build the “Dream Military”.
L3Harris Technologies jumped 5.2 per cent, Lockheed Martin climbed 4.3 per cent and Northrop Grumman added 2.4 per cent. They bounced back from losses the day before, when Trump complained defence contractors were making military equipment too slowly.
RTX came under particular criticism by Trump, and its stock lagged rivals. It inched up 0.8 per cent after Trump said that it was the “slowest in increasing their volume”.
Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday calling on the Pentagon to ensure future contracts with contractors contain a provision prohibiting them to buy back their own stock during a period of underperformance on US government contracts.
The number of US workers applying for unemployment benefits rose last week, a potential indicator of increasing lay-offs, but by no more than economists expected. Other reports said US workers improved their productivity by more in the northern summer than economists expected, while the US trade deficit unexpectedly shrank in October.
Another winner on Wall Street was Constellation Brands, which climbed 5.3 per cent after the beer and wine company reported a better profit for the latest quarter than analysts expected.
The wins helped work against drops for several technology stocks that held back the overall market. Nvidia was the heaviest weight on the S&P 500 after dropping 2.2 per cent and giving back some of its big gain of nearly 40 per cent last year.
All told, the S&P 500 added 0.53 to 6921.46 points. The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 270.03 to 49,266.11, and the Nasdaq composite fell 104.26 to 23,480.02.
It’s not just Venezuela where the US military could see action, as Trump talks about “troubled and dangerous times”. The president in recent days has also called for taking over the Danish territory of Greenland for national security reasons and has suggested he’s open to carrying out military operations in Colombia, although he appeared to lower the temperature on that threat overnight.
In sharemarkets abroad, indexes moved modestly in Europe following a weak finish in Asia.
Japan’s Nikkei 225 dropped 1.6 per cent for one of the world’s bigger moves, while Hong Kong’s Hang Seng fell 1.2 per cent.
In the bond market, the yield on the 10-year Treasury rose to 4.18 per cent from 4.15 per cent late on Wednesday.
With AP
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