A roundup of Thursday’s stock market results from across the Americas
🌎 Chile’s IPSA leads LatAm gains:
The majority of Latin America’s stock markets closed higher on Thursday, led by Chile’s IPSA index (IPSA), while Argentina’s Merval index (MERVAL) and Colombia’s Colcap (COLCAP) closed lower.
The IPSA closed 1.61% higher, boosted by the shares of Sociedad de Inversiones Oro Blanco (OROB), Enel Chile (ENELCHIL) and Sociedad Química y Minera de Chile (SQM/B).
The most pessimistic projections regarding how Chile’s GDP could evolve in 2023 are a thing of the past and, although previous estimates continue to anticipate a slight contraction, there are more and more analysts who consider it possible that the economy will not fall and that there will even be a slight advance.
As of February, the median of consulting firms considered that Chile would fall 1.5% during 2023, according to the Survey of Economic Expectations of the central bank of Chile. However, these forecasts cut the fall projections to 1.1% in the March survey and in April they already expect the decline to be 0.5%.
On the other hand, Finance Minister José Antonio Ocampo’s leaving President Gustavo Petro’s cabinet has generated uncertainty in the market, and who will be replaced by Ricardo Bonilla, an economic advisor and close friend of Petro.
Amid the political situation in the country, the Colcap closed with a loss of 1.53% with the finance and materials sectors dragging down the performance of the Colombian stock market.
Meanwhile, Argentina’s Merval fell 2.62%. The central bank raised the Leliq rate on Thursday, this time by 10 percentage points. The bank’s board of directors, led by Miguel Pesce, made the second consecutive increase in order to contain the dollar and inflation.
🗽On Wall Street:
US equities rose the most since January, while Treasuries retreated, after solid earnings from technology companies blotted out the impact of a report showing slowing economic growth and higher-than-forecast inflation.
The S&P 500 jumped 2.0% and the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 (CCMPDL) rose 2.8% as a surge in advertising revenue helped Meta Platforms Inc. (META) beat analyst estimates for profit, pushing the company’s shares 10% higher. Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) and Intel Corp. (INTC) were also higher in postmarket trading after releasing results.
“Coming into this week, the biggest concern investors had was that any or all of the mega-cap tech were likely to disappoint — the setup was difficult because they had all run up into earnings,” Art Hogan, chief market strategist at B. Riley Wealth Management, said in an interview. “Yet there’s a ubiquitous feeling large-cap tech did a great job managing their businesses — it’s a sigh of relief the market is breathing,”
Hasbro Inc. was the latest consumer company to top earnings estimates after the likes of Coca-Cola Co. and Procter & Gamble Co. That boosted confidence corporate America is coping relatively well with price pressures and policy tightening. Hasbro shares jumped 15%.
Treasuries fell, with the policy-sensitive two-year yield trading at 4.08%, as the unexpectedly high inflation data could prompt the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates higher for longer. The US central bank is expected to raise rates by a quarter percentage point at its meeting next week.
“We are seeing heavier reactions in tech as firms are beginning to bear the fruit of earlier cost efficiencies,” Lewis Grant, senior portfolio manager for global equities at Federated Hermes, wrote in a note to clients. “Investor sentiment remains every bit as fragile as the global economy and earnings season provides much needed visibility on the general health of firms.”
Dana Peterson, chief economist at The Conference Board, said the latest batch of economic data — including a slowdown in US jobless claims — showed the kind of cognitive dissonance investors have been grappling with as “typically when you have recessions, the labor market collapses with GDP, and we’re not seeing that.”
“We’re probably going to dip into a recession, maybe starting right now in the second quarter, but we really need to see data,” she said. “Our leading indicators index suggests that it’s starting to happen now, and consumers and CEOs have been anticipating recession for some time.”
In Europe, the Stoxx 600 Index was little changed after earlier fluctuations. Sanofi’s profit topped estimates while Deutsche Bank AG dropped after trading revenue disappointed.
Elsewhere, oil fluctuated after a Wednesday fall. The dollar was little changed. And Bitcoin resumed an advance.
The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index was little changed, the euro fell 0.2% to $1.1024, the British pound rose 0.2% to $1.2491 and the Japanese yen fell 0.2% to 133.90 per dollar.
🍝 For the dinner table debate:
Despite high airfares and rising hotel costs around the world, this year will see corporate or business travel budgets return to pre-pandemic levels, experts predict.
A Morgan Stanley global survey of 100 corporate travel managers shows that the majority believe their companies will return to investing in business travel for their executives. Some challenges for the business travel industry are airfares and hotel room rates, which have increased as millions of people reactivate their vacation or business travel plans.
In this sense, one of the trends that could also see changes is that of products designed for business travelers, specifically mileage or points plans.
As Morgan Stanley and IMARC analysts point out, business travel around the world often incorporates elements of bleisure, one of the biggest trends in the industry. As such, it will be interesting to see how companies across the travel circuit incorporate their products and services into attractive plans and packages that allow business travelers to accrue benefits such as miles or points. Against this backdrop, Bloomberg Línea presents its list of the Best Credit Cards for Travel in Latin America.
Leidys Becerra, a content producer at Bloomberg Línea, and Vildana Hajric and Carly Wanna of Bloomberg News, contributed to this report.
