On Friday, NASDAQ and the S&P 500 index witnessed a steep weekly fall in last 4 months due to the slow growth in the global economy. The losses on the last day of trading gave the S&P 500 index its fourth losing week out of the last five.
The slowdown of the global economy hammered the commodity-related stocks while the biotech giant Biogen's financial earnings report influenced the entire sector to slump down this week. Biogen, Inc (NASDAQ:BIIB) posts almost half of its revenue growth forecast for 2015, which resulted in a 22 percent loss of its stock value to close at $ 300.03.
Standard & Poor's 500 index fell by 22.5 points (2.2 percent) to end the week at 2079.65. Even the Dow Jones Industrial Average index has posted a largest weekly fall since January 2015. Dow Jones (DJI) fell by 163.39 points (2.9 percent) to end the trading week at 17568.53. NASDAQ Composite fell by 57.78 points (2.3 percent) to close the week's trading at 5088.63.
Oil price is in its lowest point since March 2015, while the energy and materials sectors weighed heavily on the share market following the weaker global economic data (China and the Euro zone). The global economic data was expected to be better than the actual outcome.
Art Hogan, chief market strategist at Wunderlich Securities in New York, said:
"You got underwhelming revenue growth on balance and then you layer on top of that concern over a global economic slowdown, that becomes self-fulfilling."
Shining of Amazon.com, Inc.
Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) is officially bigger than Wal-Mart now. The shares of Amazon picked up almost 10 percent on Friday. This happened on the account of a surprise second quarter profit that was reported. A hike of 20 percent is also experienced in the revenue of the company. The shares of Amazon raised to $ 47.24 or 9.8 percent and closed at $ 529.42. This implies to more than 47 percent in the last 12 months.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos earned $ 7 billion in an hour when the share price jumped 20 percent in the pre-market trading on Friday. The CEO of the company Jeff Bezos commands a hold on 83,921,121 shares in the company. A proper gain of more than $ 8.05 billion was made by the company before the opening on Friday. After the closing of the market, the market value of the company rose to $ 23.185 billion from $ 19.34 billion, which surprised the expectations of the analysts.
Despite the tech giant's spike, S&P 500 fell to its 4 month low – that shows the thinning of leadership in the index. Only Amazon and three other companies influenced the gains of the S&P 500 index this year so far.
According to the Thomson Reuters data on second quarter earnings of S&P 500 companies, only 52 percent of the companies beat revenue forecast while 74 percent of these companies surpassed analysts' profit forecast.
One more company in Dow Jones index is Visa, which closed up 4.3 percent at $ 74.80 following the tremendous financial results for second quarter that beats analysts' expectations.
NASDAQ Composite posted 50 new 52-week highs and 200 new lows while the Standard & Poor's 500 index recorded 13 new highs and 54 lows.
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