Intel on the move in Wall Street’s bullish opening

The US stock markets opened higher on Tuesday. Among the main indexes, the S&P 500 rose by 0.4 percent, the Nasdaq by 0.8 percent, and the Dow Jones by 0.2 percent.

At the top of the exchanges Nvidia was up 1.5 percent and Apple down 0.6 percent. Most of the big techno companies were on a strong rise.

A semiconductor company that started with an increase of more than four percent Intel was the strongest opening stock in the US. The company told about a large customer base Amazon Web Servicesin with where Intel’s contract manufacturing business makes artificial intelligence chips for use by AWS. The company also said that it received three billion dollars in funding through the US CHIPS Act support program to build production capacity in the US. In addition, the company said it would separate the chip contract manufacturing business into a separate company owned by Intel. This administrative move is hoped to reassure potential chip design customers that contract manufacturing is an independent unit, isolated from Intel’s chip design.

The main event of the market week is Wednesday’s Fed rate decision. The Fed is expected to start lowering the key interest rate. Today, Tuesday, investors were interested in the recent August retail sales figures from the United States.

In August, retail sales increased by 0.1 percent from July, while expectations were for a 0.2 percent decrease. According to revised figures, sales in July had increased by 1.1 percent from the previous month.

Futures exchange CME’s FedWatch tool says the market is pricing in a 65 percent chance of a half-percentage-point cut and a 35 percent chance of a 0.25-percentage-point drop from the current range of 5.25-5.50 percent.

The weakness of retail trade may contribute to increasing the Fed’s pressure for a larger one-time decrease of half a percentage point in the key interest rate. In the market, it is already taken for granted that interest rate cuts will start in the US tomorrow anyway. The head of the Fed Jerome Powellin speeches at the Jackson Hole central bankers’ conference in August seemed to confirm the matter.