[New York Stock Market Briefing] All Three Major U.S. Indices Rise... Tesla Up 2.8% · MS Down 6.2%

All three major indices of the New York Stock Exchange rose. Microsoft fell more than 6%, but other tech stocks showed resilience.

On the 30th (local time), the Dow Jones Industrial Average on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) closed at 44,882.13, up 168.61 points (0.38%) from the previous session. The Standard & Poor's (S&P) 500 Index rose 31.86 points (0.53%) to 6,071.17, and the Nasdaq Composite closed at 19,681.75, up 49.43 points (0.25%).

By sector, all sectors except technology rose. Consumer staples, healthcare, industrials, materials, real estate, and communication services rose more than 1%, and utilities surged 2.14%.

Before the market opened, the U.S. Department of Commerce announced that the preliminary GDP growth rate for the fourth quarter of last year was 2.3% annually. This was lower than the 3.1% growth rate in the third quarter of last year and also below the economists' forecast of 2.5% compiled by Dow Jones. The overall annual growth rate for last year was 2.8%.

Microsoft (MS), which announced its earnings, plunged 6.18%. Concerns about cloud services negatively impacted investor sentiment. Revenue from the Intelligent Cloud segment, which includes cloud services like Azure and Windows Server, was $25.54 billion. This was below the Wall Street consensus of $25.83 billion compiled by market research firm StreetAccount. Azure's growth rate was 31%, slightly down from the previous quarter's 33%.

Excluding MS, big tech showed resilience. Tesla rose 2.76%. Last year's fourth-quarter revenue was $25.71 billion, below the market expectation of $27.26 billion. Earnings per share (EPS) also fell short of expectations. However, comments during the conference call that Tesla plans to produce low-cost electric vehicles in the first half of this year as scheduled and that car sales will grow this year had an impact.

Meta also rose more than 1%. Recently, CEO Mark Zuckerberg predicted that the number of users of 'Meta AI' would reach 1 billion. He also expected that the soon-to-be-released Large Language Model (LLM) Llama 4 would become an industry leader. NVIDIA rose 0.77%.

After the market closed, Apple announced that it recorded $124.3 billion in revenue and $2.4 in earnings per share for the fourth quarter of last year. This exceeded the average Wall Street analysts' forecast of $124.12 billion in revenue and $2.35 in earnings per share compiled by market research firm LSEG.

In the U.S., the number of weekly new unemployment insurance claims fell below market expectations, showing a downward trend. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the number of people who newly claimed unemployment insurance for the week ending on the 25th was 207,000 on a seasonally adjusted basis. This was a decrease of 16,000 from the previous week's 223,000.

Suk-Hwan Kim, a researcher at Mirae Asset Securities, explained, "Market participants are still paying attention to the Federal Reserve's interest rate policy direction and global economic growth trends," adding, "The slowdown in U.S. GDP growth and the stabilization of the employment market could be a background for the Fed's interest rate freeze."

According to the CME FedWatch Tool of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the probability of a 25 basis point (1bp=0.01% point) rate cut in the federal funds rate futures market by March fell to 18%.

Young-ki Jin, Hankyung.com reporter young71@hankyung.com