Morgans AM: Friday, 9 August 2024

US equity markets rallied sharply amid a broad-based rally that saw the S&P 500 and Nasdaq record their strongest session since 30 November, 2022 after the latest weekly jobless claims figures soothed nerves in some quarters around the strength of the labour market - Dow gained +683-points or +1.76%, logging its strongest session since 16 July. The broader S&P500 rallied +2.3%. Information Technology rallied +3.31% to lead all eleven primary sectors higher, six of which logged gains of more than >2%. Palantir Technologies jumped +11.25 after the company announced an agreement with Microsoft Corp (+1.07%) to provide the U.S. government with secure cloud, artificial intelligence (AI), and analytics capabilities for national security. The agreement provides the U.S. government agencies including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) with large language models (LLMs) through Azure OpenAI Services, Microsoft's cloud offerings through its partnership with OpenAI, and Palantir's AI Platform (AIP). Warner Bros. Discovery Inc shed -8.95% after the entertainment giant posted a loss of nearly -US$10B for the second quarter after the close of the previous session.