Markets Climb as AI Fuels Investor Optimism

0:00 Speaker 1 Feel the energy of the fly. From the second to the ninth of August, Belfast welcomes the Coultis Flakhielmaheran, the world’s biggest celebration of Irish music and culture. Enjoy lively club sessions, street performances and all Ireland competitions on Belfast historic streets and world class stages. Whether you’re a devoted Troup follower or a wide eyed first timer, be part

0:23 of celebrating together. Plan your trip at flock hule dot Ie, organized by Cultis and Belfa City Council.

0:30 Speaker 2 An update on the market, Well, John Tarrett is one smart guy and he gives us an update every Sunday morning. And John Terrett, what the heck is going on with the markets? I mean, looks like the Dow Jones is at all time high at fifty two.

0:44 Speaker 3 Thousand, flirting with all time highs. It’s got to be good. You predicted it and it’s come true. But I must be honest with you. It was a bit of a whipsaw week one way or another. Markets who were both sharply up and sharply down in the course of the last five training days now the center of it all.

0:59 On Wednesday, was Micron, which is based in Boise in Idaho. They make memory chips. Very important to have memory, and that’s what they do now. Going into their earnings, the shares were down about two to six percent because people thought they wouldn’t be very good when they came out.

1:13 They turned out to be stellar. So on Wednesday evening the stock was up sixteen percent. It was up seventeen percent on Thursday, but it was down about three percent on Friday. And the reason for all this interest is that Micron proves that there is still demand for AI chips out there, even if there’s a bit of a

1:29 bottleneck in getting them to the customers who actually buy them. Now, the Magnificent seven, the big tech companies over at the Nasdaq were all lower for most of last week, and that’s because Water Street is still very concerned about the amount of money they’re spending on AI and whether they’ll ever see a return on it. Oil, of course, fell

1:45 below seventy dollars a barrel. Would you like to take a bow, John, I’m envisaging you now taking a bow.

1:52 Speaker 2 Sixty nine. It was sixty nine yesterday.

1:57 Speaker 3 I know you said it would happen when the war started coming to an end. Nobody believed you, but you are absolutely right, and that is indeed what happened. So basically with oil, we’re boil us back now to where we were before the fighting in the Middle East started out.

2:09 Speaker 2 Now.

2:09 Speaker 3 Unfortunately, on Thursday, oil did go back up a bit because somebody fired what they caught a suicide drone add a Singaporean registered vessel over in the straight near the country of Oman. No one knows who did it, but it did spike oil prices a little bit. The other big story of the week PCEE, the Fed’s preferred measure

2:26 of inflation, personal consumption and expenditure, hitting a three year high virtually guarantees a rate hike before the year’s end, so they say on Wall String, Apple felt six percent. They put their prices up and that really affected Asia trading on Friday. The crypto story of the week Bitcoin below sixty thousand for the first time since October twenty

2:44 twenty four. I wouldn’t worry too much about this. Bitcoin’s very volatile, and we have seen it in recent years as low as sixteen thousand per token, So we’ll see what happens tomorrow at Monday. Alphabet Google takes over from Verizon at the Dow Jones. As the Dow continues to evolve and reflect the US corporate life. It’s moved through

3:01 its manufacturing stage into its banking and insurance stage, and is now on to its big tech stage. And in the week ahead, it’ll be the build up, of course to July the fourth, a very special July the fourth East year for all of us, as America celebrates its two hundred and fiftieth birthday. And a note of interest,

3:17 the New York Stock Exchange was founded in seventeen ninety two when twenty four people got together and signed the Buttonwood Agreement. And that means the nicey is sixteen years younger than the country it serves.

3:30 Speaker 2 John, thank you so much, and we’ll catch up again real soon and next weekend. I can’t believe it’s for the July already.

3:37 Speaker 3 I know it’s going to be very exciting, very exciting. So I’ll see you next Sunday. Thank you,