On Wednesday Eastern Time, the US stock market opened lower and fell, with the three major indexes collectively closing lower. The Nasdaq fell 3.64%, the largest daily decline since October 2022, and the lowest closing point since mid June; The S&P 500 index fell 2.32%, marking the largest daily decline since December 2022; The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 1.25%. Large tech stocks experienced a general decline, with Tesla falling more than 12%, marking its largest daily drop since September 2020, and its total market value falling below $700 billion; Nvidia fell over 6%, Meta and Google fell over 5%, Microsoft and Intel fell over 3%, Apple and Amazon fell over 2%, and Netflix fell over 1%
Popular Chinese concept stocks generally fell, with the Nasdaq China Golden Dragon Index falling 1.93%. Ideal Auto, Xiaopeng Motors, and NIO fell more than 4%, Tencent Music, Futu Holdings, and iQiyi fell more than 3%, Bilibili and Manbang fell more than 2%, Baidu, JD.com, and Vipshop fell more than 1%, and Pinduoduo, Weibo, and Alibaba fell slightly. NetEase rose by over 1%.
Global News
Trump encounters a major change suddenly! Harris counterattack
Trump doesn't seem as stable as imagined! The latest Reuters/Ipsos poll shows that after US President Joe Biden ended his re-election campaign and passed the torch to Vice President Kamala Harris, Harris currently leads Republican Donald Trump by a narrow margin of two percentage points in support.
"Where has Biden gone?" End of the whole play: COVID-19 turns negative+public appearance on Wednesday to deliver a national speech
US President Biden, who disappeared from public view for nearly a week, finally made a public appearance. White House doctor Dr. Kevin O'Connor said in a letter updating the president's physical condition on Tuesday that Biden's symptoms of COVID-19 infection had disappeared, and the latest rapid antigen test was negative. The follow-up medical team will continue to test his condition to prevent virus recurrence.
The expectation of the Federal Reserve's interest rate cut is getting stronger and stronger, and the 2-year Treasury bond auction has achieved record demand
US bond yields generally fell slightly on Tuesday, with weak housing and regional Federal Reserve manufacturing data released by the US on the same day, further fueling expectations of multiple interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve in the second half of the year. In addition, the two-year treasury bond auction conducted by the US Treasury Department on Tuesday also saw record strong demand, and investors swarmed in, which strongly demonstrated their confidence that the easing cycle might be about to start.
Is it difficult for the US stock market to stop rising? Wall Street bigwigs point straight at these two key 'catalysts'
Ed Yardeni, President of Yardeni Research, a Wall Street long bull and investment consulting firm, said that as investors digest two key economic data and the second quarter financial report, the US stock market will continue to rise. In his latest report, he emphasized that the upcoming release of the second quarter GDP and the June personal consumption expenditure price index are key factors in the sustained rise of the US stock market.
The Asia Pacific market has experienced a sharp decline! Is the global stock market entering a garbage time?
After a year and a half of significant gains, the global stock market has recently weakened noticeably. Although many people are still looking forward to a 'rate cut transaction', the rise of the past year and a half is also a result of a rate cut transaction. The entire Asia Pacific market has once again weakened across the board, with the Japanese stock market plummeting by over 1%. Since July 11th, the Nikkei 225 index has fallen nearly 7%. The stock markets of South Korea, Singapore, and Malaysia have also shown signs of fatigue recently.
Company News
Tesla Q2 profit falls short of expectations, Robotaxi postponed to October release
After Tuesday's close Eastern Time, Tesla released its second quarter financial report. The company's second quarter revenue was higher than expected, but its profit was lower than expected, continuing the poor start of the year with slow sales and large-scale layoffs. According to the financial report, Tesla's Q2 revenue was $25.5 billion, with market expectations of $24.8 billion, compared to $24.927 billion in the same period last year; The operating profit for the second quarter was 1.605 billion US dollars, a year-on-year decrease of 33%, and the market expectation was 1.81 billion US dollars; Adjusted earnings per share were $0.52, lower than market expectations of $0.6.
Google's parent company's Q2 performance announcement also disclosed this information
Thanks to the strong performance of search advertising and cloud computing businesses, Google's Q2 performance exceeded expectations. On July 23rd local time, Alphabet, the parent company of Google, released its quarterly financial results as of June 30th, 2024. According to the financial report, Alphabet's total revenue for the second quarter was $84.7 billion, a year-on-year increase of 14%, higher than analysts' general expectation of $84.2 billion. Net profit recorded $23.6 billion, with earnings per share of $1.89, higher than the expected $1.84 per share.
Meta's most powerful model surpasses GPT-4o, Zuckerberg once again stirs up the debate over open and closed sources
On July 24th, Meta released the open-source large model series Llama 3.1 405B, as well as upgraded models in two sizes: 70B and 8B. Llama 3.1 405B is considered the strongest open-source model currently available. According to the information released by Meta, the model supports a context length of 128K and has added support for eight languages. It is comparable to flagship models such as GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet in terms of general knowledge, operability, mathematics, tool usage, and multilingual translation. Even in human evaluation comparisons, its overall performance is better than these two models.
Texas Instruments releases second quarter report: revenue declines year-on-year, gross profit margin increases month on month
On the morning of July 24th, Texas Instruments, a leading analog chip company, disclosed its Q2 2024 performance report. Among them, the revenue was 3.822 billion US dollars, a year-on-year decrease of 16%; Net profit was 1.127 billion US dollars, a year-on-year decrease of 35%. Specifically, the simulated business revenue was $2.928 billion, a year-on-year decrease of 11%; Embedded business revenue was $615 million, a year-on-year decrease of 31%.
Analysts say that Apple is expected to launch foldable phones within three years, but the maturity of its technology and market capacity are concerns
On July 24th, in response to rumors that Apple plans to launch a foldable phone in 2026, Chen Jun, Vice President and Chief Analyst of Sigmientell, told First Financial reporters that Apple has plans for a foldable phone, which may be launched in 2027. The reporter learned that the technological maturity and market capacity of foldable phones are the main concerns for Apple's delay in launching foldable phones.