WSJ What’s News - What’s News in Markets: Trump Trade, Chip Makers Sink, Domino’s Drops

Episode Date: July 20, 2024

How did the markets react to the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump? And why did big chip stocks slip? Plus, why is Domino’s Pizza cutting back on new stores? Host Francesca Fontana discusses the biggest stock moves of the week and the news that drove them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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and this is What's News in Markets, our look at the biggest stock moves of the week and the news that drove them. Let's get to it. It was a pretty wild week for the stock market, and there was certainly no shortage of things for investors to digest. There was the resurgence of the so-called Trump trade Monday after the attempted assassination of the former president. More on that in a bit. We also got more earnings from Wall Street giants like Goldman Sachs that pushed bank stocks higher. Some comments from Fed Chair Jerome Powell that didn't give us much more clarity on rate cuts. And a retreat of big tech stocks. Plus, we ended the week with a giant global tech outage. All in all, the major indexes ended the week mixed, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average being the only one to notch a weekly gain, adding almost 1%.

Let's go back to the Trump trade, aka the moves that investors make as they weigh the odds of a Trump victory in November. On Monday, which was the first trading session after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, we saw a big leap in DJT. Yes, those are Trump's initials, and yes, that's also the ticker for Trump Media & Technology, the parent company of his social media platform, Truth Social. The stock moved higher Monday, as did bets on Trump to win the White House on Predict It, an online marketplace that lets people bet on political events. Also moving higher was Bitcoin, in turn lifting stocks

like crypto exchange Coinbase Global, since Trump has cast himself as a pro-crypto candidate. Later this month, in fact, he'll be speaking at the annual Bitcoin conference. So how big was Trump media's rally on Monday? Pretty big. The stock ended a whopping 31% higher and held on to some of those gains through Friday, ending the week up about 13%. Speaking of Trump, he also played a role in some chip makers losing ground on Wednesday. In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, Trump took aim at Taiwan's dominance in the semiconductor market, which we so often discuss here, thanks to AI fueling crazy demand for chip manufacturers. Trump said Taiwan took, quote, about 100% of our chip business, unquote, that it should pay for U.S.

military support, and he questioned subsidies for a TSMC factory in the U.S. TSMC, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, being the biggest contract chipmaker in the world. In response, U.S.-listed shares of TSMC sank 8% on Wednesday, joined by other chipmakers like NVIDIA and Micron amid a broader tech decline. The next day, TSMC reported earnings. It raised its sales outlook and posted better-than-expected quarterly profit, thanks to good old AI. But the good news didn't do too much to help the stock recover. TSMC's U.S. shares edged higher Thursday before losing about 3.5% on Friday.

Apologies if you're listening on an empty stomach, because we're talking about pizza. Domino's pizza. If you didn't already know, Domino's is the world's biggest pizza chain, with the biggest piece of the pie both in sales and in stores. But the chain isn't going to grow as much as expected this year. In its latest earnings report, Domino's slashed its forecast for worldwide store openings by up to 25%. Why isn't there more hunger for new stores? Apparently, the issue is with one of its master franchisees, Australia-based Domino's Pizza Enterprises, which also operates stores in Asia and Europe. It's closing dozens

of stores in Japan and France and reviewing the performance of the entire business. While Domino's also posted a better-than-expected quarterly profit, it wasn't enough to whet investors' appetite. The news took a big slice out of Domino's shares, which dropped 14% Thursday and lost 1.2% Friday. All right, I am officially out of food puns and I'm officially starving. And now you know what's news in markets this week. You can read about more stocks that moved on the week's news in The Score, my column in the Wall Street Journal's Exchange section. I'm Francesca Fontana. Have a great weekend and see you next Saturday.