Software group Microsoft was a striking loser on Thursday when the stock exchanges in New York opened. The company behind brands such as Windows and cloud software service Azure announced shortly before the opening bell that it was looking more gloomy when it came to sales and profits due to unfavourable exchange rates. The stock lost about 3 percent.
Stock markets generally opened with modest losses. Among other things, attention was paid to figures on job growth in the American corporate sector from payslip processor ADP. They were much weaker than expected. According to ADP, 128,000 jobs were added in the corporate sector in May. Economists expected 300,000 jobs on average. It is the weakest job growth since the economic recovery from the corona crisis. American companies are struggling to find more employees.
The US government jobs report will be released on Friday. That report plays an important role in the interest rate policy of the central bank umbrella Federal Reserve. There were also figures on benefit claims in the United States. They were slightly lower than predicted.
Shortly after opening, the Dow-Jones index recorded a minus of 0.2 percent at 32,738 points. The broad S&P 500 fell 0.3 percent to 4,091 points and the technology gauge Nasdaq also fell 0.3 percent to 11,944 points.
Among Wall Street businesses, online pet food and accessories retailer Chewy (plus 14 percent) was a notable gainer on the back of well-received quarterly earnings. PVH, the parent company of clothing brands Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, also opened the books about the past period and was rewarded with a price increase of 2.5 percent. Technology group Hewlett-Packard Enterprise came in with disappointing performance and forecasts, yielding more than 8 percent.
The oil market is also in the spotlight. Oil group OPEC+ has decided, according to insiders, to increase oil production in July and August by a much larger step than in recent months. The price of a barrel of American oil nevertheless rose by 0.7 percent to 115.97 dollars. Brent oil gained 0.5 percent to $116.90 a barrel.