The week Wall Street welcomed a record IPO and Europe took a beating – weekly recap
While US indices closed the week in the green, Europe experienced one of the weakest weeks this summer. Meanwhile, the Nasdaq hosted the largest debut of a foreign company in the history of US exchanges.
How did the major indices perform?
🟢The S&P 500 index gained more than 0.8% for the week and closed at 7,578 points on Friday.
🟢The Nasdaq Composite added 0.65% and finished at 26,281 points.
🔴The Dow Jones, on the other hand, lost 0.5% for the week.
🔴Germany's DAX shed more than 2.7% for the week and fell back below the 25,100-point mark, dragged down mainly by tech stocks such as Infineon and Siemens Energy.
Star of the week: SK Hynix
Friday belonged to the South Korean memory maker. SK Hynix opened on the Nasdaq at $170, roughly 14% above the $149 IPO price, and raised $26.5 billion.
This is the largest US listing of a foreign company in history. The company is the world's largest manufacturer of HBM chips, which power AI accelerators from $NVDA and $AMD.
Rival Micron $MU reacted to the debut with a decline.
Meta had its best week in two years
Shares of $META gained nearly 15% for the week, their best weekly performance since February 2024.
According to an internal memo, the company is developing its own chip and plans to add 14 GW of computing capacity in 2026 and 2027, at a significantly lower cost than analysts expected. Bank of America $BAC estimates costs of around $22 billion per gigawatt, compared to the previously assumed $45 billion.
Geopolitics still at play
The US-Iran ceasefire hung by a thread all week, attacks in the Strait of Hormuz continued, and shipping slowed significantly.
Oil, however, remained surprisingly calm and closed on Friday around $71.5 a barrel.
Moreover, the IEA expects global oil demand to fall by 1 million barrels per day this year, which would be the first year-on-year decline since the COVID year of 2020.
Fed: talk is no longer about cutting, but about raising
The market is currently pricing in a 61% probability of a rate hike in September.
What awaits us next week?
Earnings season kicks into full gear. On Tuesday, $JPM reports along with other major banks, and next week results from $ASML and $TSM are also due. Given how strongly chips have been driving the entire market this year, these will probably be the most important numbers of the entire month.