FILE PHOTO: A trader works on the trading floor at the New York Stock Exchange in New York CityAiling Tesla shares caught a rare 10% break overnight despite the electric auto giant's quarterly revenue miss, underscoring a better market mood as Meta steps up to the earnings dock later and U.S. business activity cools in April.
In the background, the U.S. Senate voted by a wide margin late Tuesday in favor of legislation that would ban TikTok in the United States if its owner, the Chinese tech firm ByteDance, fails to divest the popular short video app over the next nine months to a year. The move ups the ante in the increasingly tense U.S.-China tech standoff.
Even though the miss may seem worrying, markets read the report as a potential relief to the increasingly hawkish Federal Reserve - helping Fed rate futures and Treasuries rally. The weak yen and rallying tech sector saw Japan's Nikkei outperform generally buoyant world stocks on Wednesday, with gains of more than 2%.
Shares in French luxury group Kering were a standout mover, falling by almost 10% in early trade to their lowest level in over 6 years as the market digested news of a likely 40%-45% plunge in first-half operating profit.