SPX: spooky words “DeepSeek” and “tariffs”It was a shaky week on the US equity markets, which included a lot of news. The week started with shocking news that a Chinese, a $6 million start-up company overtook the AI market with its program DeepSeek. As per news, the program was superior to the ChatGPT and swiftly took the first place at the Apple store in terms of downloads. No need to say that it was quite painful for the price of Nvidia shares, which tumbled immediately, ending the week at 16% loss. The next important event during the week was the FOMC meeting and rate decision. The Fed decided to leave interest rates unchanged, as was expected by the market. And the minute investors thought that the rest of the week would be calm, the next news came from the new US Administration, that the US will impose trade tariffs for goods imported from Canada, Mexico and China. The tariffs will be applied from Saturday, while markets had a strong negative reaction on Friday's trading session.
During the week the S&P 500 was traded in a mixed manner, considering a bunch of significant news. Although the index tried to reconcile during the week, from its starting point at 5.970, it is ending the week at the level of 6.040, after reaching the highest weekly level at 6.115. Certainly, there is the weekly gain, however, what is actual investor sentiment regarding the tariffs will be seen at the beginning of the week ahead. For the moment, investors are still optimistic with respect to tech equities. If we exclude the “out of nowhere” shock related to DeepSeek, investors are waiting with anticipation for the quarterly results of Nvidia. Apple posted relatively solid results during the previous week. Although the sale of IPhones is not doing quite well, still, Apple is able to cover the decrease in sales with an increase of income from services. Amazon and Google are also posting results in the week ahead. With nonfarm payrolls scheduled for a release, it is a promise of another challenging week on financial markets.
