Nvidia kisses $573 billion goodbye, and Sasol feels the heat

South Africa’s rand ended trading on Friday at R16.92 against the United States dollar, far weaker than where it started the week.

This marks a seven-month low for South Africa’s currency, which had remained resilient amid pressures stemming from the war in Iran.

However, a firmer dollar on Friday, boosted by hawkish signals from the Federal Reserve, put pressure on the rand.

South Africa’s currency also took a beating from slips in precious metals and commodity prices, which removed support for the local currency.

This also impacted the local stock exchange, with the JSE ALSI down 0.45% on Friday, and the Top 40 Index slipping 0.47%.

Things were not much better on Wall Street, with US stock markets also finishing mostly lower on Friday.

The S&P 500 closed 0.4% lower, while the Nasdaq Composite was down 0.9%. The Dow Jones was the exception, gaining 0.1% on Friday.

This was largely driven by the continued fallout from leadership turmoil at AI leader Nvidia, whose CEO, Jensen Huang, resigned.

US markets also felt the pain of hot wholesale inflation data, offsetting what has otherwise been a positive performance this week.

In contrast, Asian markets largely recovered and stabilised on Friday, bouncing back from the Nvidia turbulence.

South Korea’s Kospi jumped 2.35%, while Japan’s Nikkei advanced 0.9%. Here, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng was the exception, dropping 1.55%.

In commodity markets, Brent crude fell 0.87% to $95.84 per barrel, while gold rose marginally by 0.02% to $3,883.89 per ounce.

At the end of trading on Friday, the rand was at R16.92 against the US dollar, R18.65 against the euro, and R22.33 against the British pound.

Important finance and investing news

Nvidia kisses $573 billion goodbye: CEO Jensen Huang’s resignation has clouded the outlook for the AI trade. This led to Nvidia’s share price slumping, wiping $573 billion off its market cap. [Wall Street Journal]

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Anthropic’s bumper IPO: Demand is high for Anthropic’s upcoming initial public offering, which is reportedly six times oversubscribed. This shows that there is still bullishness surrounding the AI trade, despite recent wobbles. [Semafor]

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Microsoft apologises for outage affecting Teams, Outlook, and 365: Microsoft said it is “deeply sorry” for the global outage affecting some of its services. The group said it is making encouraging progress in fixing the issues, 24 hours after the outage started on Friday afternoon. [BBC]

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Sasol feeling the heat: Shareholders are mounting pressure on the company amid withheld dividends and rising executive remuneration. This comes as the company focuses on chipping away at its debt, with net debt standing at R3.26 billion. [BusinessDay]

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Warren Buffett’s successor picked two winners for $126.7 billion: Greg Abel, the man who took over Berkshire Hathaway after Buffett’s retirement, has 35% of the firm’s fund invested in two winners: Apple and American Express. [Yahoo Finance]

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