[New York Stock Market] Weakness Persists on Surging Oil Prices, Oracle Jumps 9%

Financial News

The New York stock market remained under pressure on the 11th (local time).
Oracle surged on the back of a surprise earnings beat and upbeat guidance, lifting big tech shares and allowing the Nasdaq Stock Market (NASDAQ) to eke out a modest gain.

With the exception of the tech-heavy Nasdaq, major U.S. stock indexes continued to decline.
A sharp jump in oil prices amid the war involving Iran wiped out the recent rotation trade.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) and the Russell 2000 index, which had been at the center of that rotation, posted relatively steeper losses.
The Dow, which tracks 30 blue-chip stocks, fell 289.24 points, or 0.61%, to close at 47,417.27, while the small-cap Russell 2000 index slipped 5.18 points, or 0.20%, to 2,542.90.
The tech-heavy S&P 500 Index and the Nasdaq moved in opposite directions, but the swings were limited.
The S&P 500 Index edged down 5.68 points, or 0.08%, to 6,775.80, while the Nasdaq rose 19.03 points, or 0.08%, to finish at 22,716.14.
The Cboe Volatility Index (VIX), often called Wall Street’s fear gauge, stayed above the psychologically important 20 level but continued to trend lower. The VIX fell 0.70 points, or 2.81%, to 24.23.

Oracle jumped 13.72 dollars, or 9.18%, to close at 163.12 dollars.
The company’s fiscal third-quarter results, released after the previous session’s close, and its outlook for the current quarter both topped expectations. In particular, Oracle’s solid performance in its cloud division, a core infrastructure for AI, helped counter arguments that the sector is in a bubble.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), which competes with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, saw its revenue soar 84% from a year earlier. Revenue in the broader cloud segment, which includes cloud-based software, jumped 44% over the same period, lifting its share to more than half of total sales.
Despite growing talk of an AI bubble, Oracle’s sharp earnings improvement powered by AI shows that this boom is far from an illusion.

Oracle’s decision to invest an additional 50 billion dollars this year to expand its data centers also fueled gains in AI-related semiconductor stocks.
Micron Technology, a supplier of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) for AI, surged 15.58 dollars, or 3.86%, to 418.69 dollars, while sector bellwether Nvidia Corporation climbed 1.27 dollars, or 0.69%, to 186.03 dollars.
AMD gained 1.60 dollars, or 0.79%, to finish at 204.83 dollars, and Intel Corporation advanced 1.20 dollars, or 2.57%, to 47.98 dollars.
Flash memory maker SanDisk Corporation soared 36.54 dollars, or 5.90%, to 655.43 dollars. SanDisk shares have already jumped 176% this year and an astonishing 1,157% over the past 12 months.

dympna@fnnews.com Song Kyung-jae Reporter