US Stocks: Nasdaq ends sharply higher, up over 1%, after Twitter agrees to be bought by Musk Wall Street rose on Monday, with the Nasdaq ending sharply higher after Twitter agreed to be bought by billionaire Elon Musk, sparking a late day rally in growth stocks. Twitter ended up 5.6% after announcing it would be bought by Musk in a deal that will shift control of the social media giant to the world’s richest person. “You can tell growth wanted to rally all day but the market was holding it down. The Twitter news came and that was just a green light to start buying some of the growth names. They have been oversold for a while,” said Dennis Dick, a trader at Bright Trading LLC. Earlier, uncertainty reverberated across world markets, with Chinese shares marking their biggest slump since a pandemic-led selling in February 2020 and European stocks falling to their lowest in over a month on fears of strict restrictions in China. The S&P energy index dropped 3.3% as Brent crude prices dropped almost 5% toward $100 a barrel. Oil majors Chevron Corp and ExxonMobil declined more than 2%, and oilfield services companies Schlumberger NV and Halliburton Co also fell more than 6%. Google-owner Alphabet rallied 2.9% ahead of its quarterly report after the bell on Tuesday. Microsoft and Facebook owner Meta Platforms also gained.Nearly a third of S&P 500 index firms are due to report this week. Of the 102 companies in the S&P 500 that posted earnings so far, 77.5% reported above analysts’ expectations, according to Refinitiv data. “Earnings are going to be crucial to the mindset of the of the average investor. The playbook was buy Apple, buy Netflix, buy Google and throw away the key, but that playbook is no longer working,” said Jake Dollarhide, chief executive officer at Longbow Asset Management. “What is the outlook for these companies going to be?” The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.7% to end at 34,049.46 points, while the S&P 500 gained 0.57% to 4,296.12. The Nasdaq Composite climbed 1.29% to 13,004.85. The CBOE Volatility index, known as Wall Street’s fear gauge, hit as high as 31.6 points, its highest level since mid-March. Bleak results from pandemic darling Netflix along with surging bond yields pummeled high-growth stocks last week, bringing year-to-date losses in the tech-heavy Nasdaq to about 18%. Traders are pricing in big moves by the Fed this year to control inflation after a series of hawkish remarks from policymakers. Fed Chair Jerome Powell last week gave a “go” sign to a half-point rate hike in May and signaled he would be open to “front-end loading” the U.S. central bank’s retreat from super-easy monetary policy. Silicon Motion Technology Corp jumped almost 13%after a report that the chipmaker is exploring a sale. Volume on U.S. exchanges was 12.8 billion shares, compared with the 12.7 billion average for the full session over the last 20 trading days.Declining issues outnumbered advancing ones on the NYSE by a 1.19-to-1 ratio; on Nasdaq, a 1.21-to-1 ratio favored advancers. The S&P 500 posted 2 new 52-week highs and 50 new lows; the Nasdaq Composite recorded 26 new highs and 493 new lows.
Retail inflation in milk was reported at 8.85% in May 2023. The milk inflation has remained elevated at over 6% since August 2022. Despite India being the largest milk producer since 1998, the commodity has been the second biggest factor after cereals such as rice and wheat in driving up retail inflation in the last fiscal.
Milk has the second highest weight in the food and beverages basket of the consumer price index at 6.61%, a notch lower than cereals and products with a 9.67% weight. Organised players, including Mother Dairy and Amul, hiked prices multiple times in the last one year citing higher fodder cost, robust demand and some impact due to reports of lumpy skin disease.
Industry sources said feed cost, which has a share of more than 65% in the cost of production of milk, has increased to Rs 20/kg from Rs 8 a year ago. The finance ministry in April had attributed the elevated milk inflation to a demand supply mismatch and said it could be one of the factors apart from volatile international crude oil prices and constrained supplies of milk would influence the country’s inflation trajectory.
“Milk production has been impacted by a lumpy skin disease infecting millions of cattle in late 2022,” the ministry said in the monthly economic review, adding that the vaccination drive against the disease is expected to curb the spread and immune the cattle against the skin disease.
According to official data, currently India is the world’s largest milk producer, and has a share of 23% in global milk production. For the first time in decades, the country’s milk production is likely to have stagnated in 2022-23 due to Lumpy Skin Disease in cattle across several states and the lagged effect of Covid-19 in the form of stunting of the animals, a senior official with department of animal husbandry and dairying recently had stated. The milk production was estimated at 221 million tonne in 2021-22.