Mid-Morning Market Update: Markets Open Higher; Walmart Earnings Top Expectations

Following the market opening Thursday, the Dow traded up 0.79 percent to 25849.79 while the NASDAQ climbed 0.89 percent to 7,891.71. The S&P also rose, gaining 0.95 percent to 2,878.06.

Leading and Lagging Sectors

Thursday morning, the financial shares climbed by 1.3 percent. Meanwhile, top gainers in the sector included PPDAI Group Inc. PPDF up 6 percent, and Blucora, Inc. BCOR up 4 percent.

In trading on Thursday, utilities shares rose by just 0.4 percent.

Top Headline

Walmart Inc WMT reported better-than-expected earnings in its first-quarter results, while sales missed views.

Walmart reported quarterly earnings of $1.13 per share, which beat the analyst consensus estimate of $1.02 by 10.78 percent. This is a 0.88 percent decrease over earnings of $1.14 per share from the same period last year. Walmart reported quarterly sales of $123.9 billion, which missed the analyst consensus estimate of $125.03 billion. This is a 0.99 percent increase over sales of $122.69 billion the same period last year.

 

Equities Trading UP

Iovance Biotherapeutics Inc IOVA shares got a boost, shooting up 33 percent to $14.88 after the company issued updates to tumor infiltrating lymphocyte therapy programs.

Shares of KEMET Corporation KEM shot up 12 percent to $18.61 after the company reported better-than-expected Q4 EPS and sales results.

Limbach Holdings, Inc. LMB shares were also up, gaining 12 percent to $9.22 after the company reported better-than-expected Q1 results.

Equities Trading DOWN

Cellectar Biosciences, Inc. CLRB shares dropped 23 percent to $2.16 after reporting a $10 million financing.

Shares of Virtusa Corporation VRTU were down 19 percent to $43.83 after the company reported worse-than-expected Q4 EPS results, and issued weak Q1 and FY20 guidance.

EDAP TMS S.A. EDAP was down, falling around 19 percent to $3.6750 after the company reported worse-than-expected Q1 sales results.

Commodities

In commodity news, oil traded up 1.2 percent to $62.78 while gold traded down 0.3 percent to $1,294.60.

Silver traded down 0.1 percent Thursday to $14.795, while copper rose 0.9 percent to $2.7685.

 

Eurozone

European shares were higher today. The eurozone’s STOXX 600 climbed 0.4 percent, the Spanish Ibex Index rose 0.5 percent, while Italy’s FTSE MIB Index rose 0.4 percent. Meanwhile the German DAX climbed 0.6 percent, and the French CAC 40 rose 0.2 percent while U.K. shares rose 0.2 percent.

Economics

U.S. housing starts rose 5.7 percent to an annual rate of 1.24 million in April, while home-builder permits increased 0.6 percent to 1.3 million rate.

Initial jobless claims fell 16,000 to 212,000 last week. However, economists were expecting a reading of 220,000.

The Philadelphia Fed's manufacturing index increased to 16.6 in May, versus a reading of 8.5 in April.

The Energy Information Administration’s weekly report on natural gas stocks in underground storage will be released at 10:30 a.m. ET.

The Treasury is set to auction 4-and 8-week bills at 11:30 a.m. ET.

Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank President Neel Kashkari is set to speak at 12:05 p.m. ET.

Data on money supply for the recent week will be released at 4:00 p.m. ET.