US stock market opens muted on Friday, heads for a weekly loss; Crude oil cools off 3%

US markets opened on a muted note on Friday and headed for a weekly loss. The Dow Jones rose over 100 points, the S&P 500 remained unchanged, and the NASDAQ 100 opened in the red with over 150 points loss. Investor sentiment remains subdued over fears of sticky inflation and interest rate hikes, as crude oil prices bounce back more than 15% this week.

Meanwhile, Brent crude oil prices cooled off on Friday evening to trade near $96 per barrel after hitting $101 per barrel mark on Thursday. The US launched strikes on Iran for the 13th consecutive day, with both nations ruling out any possibility of talks.

Alongside the crude oil prices, the treasury yields also cooled off 0.6% on Friday near 4.6%, easing the fears for equity investors. The US 10 Y yields have soared 2.5% this week till date amid rising fears of sticky inflation. The 30Y yields also cooled off from recent highs at 5.14%.

At the stock specific level, the magnificent seven companies portrayed mixed performance Apple Inc and Alphabet Inc rising 1% and NVIDIA, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, Amazon Inc and Tesla shares fell nearly 1% on Friday.

Intel Q2 earnings

Intel Corporation announced its quarterly earnings on Thursday after market hours and posted robust results, beating consensus estimates. The shares opened in green, but pared all the gains to trade 3.5% lower on Friday. The company’s revenue for the quarter jumped 25% YoY to $16.1 billion, the strongest growth in 15 years. Company’s non-GAAP eps came in significantly higher at $0.42 per share than consensus estimates of $0.21 per share.

The data centre and AI revenue surged nearly 60% to $6.26 billion, the computing segment revenue rose 13% at $8.8 billion and the Intel foundry revenue soared 31% to $5.77 billion. Management guided for $15.8 billion to $16.8 billion revenue and EPS of $0.38 per share for Q3. Intel shares are one of the major top gainers this year with over 158% gains.