US: Stocks end volatile week on muted note

WALL Street stocks finished mixed on Friday (Feb 14) following lacklustre US retail sales data in a muted finale to a volatile week.

US retail sales fell 0.9 per cent between December and January to US$723.9 billion, partly due to slumping auto sales. The report missed estimates in the biggest month-on-month decline since early 2023.

The drop was due partly to bad weather that depressed demand, but the result could also show “a little consumer fatigue”, said Briefing.com analyst Patrick O’Hare.

The broad-based S&P 500 ended unchanged at 6,114.63, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average shed 0.4 per cent to 44,546.08.

But the tech-rich Nasdaq Composite Index climbed 0.4 per cent to 20,026.77.

“The stock market continues to maintain this resilient disposition,” said O’Hare, who pointed to strong corporate earnings as an offset to concerns about tariffs and an uptick in inflation.

Among individual stocks, Airbnb rocketed 14.5 per cent higher following strong earnings. Revenues jumped 12 per cent in the fourth quarter to US$2.5 billion.

Dell gained 3.7 per cent following a Bloomberg report it is close to selling US$5 billion worth of servers to Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence (AI) startup.

But semiconductor company Applied Materials fell 8.2 per cent on a disappointing forecast.

The AI-oriented company is “encouraged by the trends supporting continued customer investments to enable leading-edge technology inflections, while also taking into account export control related headwinds”, said Applied Materials chief financial officer Brice Hill. AFP