Source: Global Market Report

No. 1 in US stock turnover on Thursday$NVIDIA (NVDA.US)$The closing price was 0.76% higher, and the transaction was US$37.864 billion. Nvidia announced optimizations to all of its platforms to accelerate META LLAMA 3.

Evercore ISI released a report this week saying that although Nvidia's stock price has soared more than 200% over the past year, the stock still has a lot of potential to rise. The bank rated Nvidia's stock as “outperforming the market”, with a target price of $1,160, with a potential increase of 36% from current levels.

Evercore believes that under a bull market scenario, Nvidia's stock price may soar to $1,540 next year, up 81% from the current level; the reason it has set such a high price target is because Nvidia is not just a chip company, even though most investors still think so.

Second place$Tesla (TSLA.US)$It closed down 3.55% and traded at US$14.403 billion. According to reports, Tesla CEO Musk said in a brief email to employees on Wednesday (April 17, 2024), “In the process of restructuring Tesla, I noticed that some severance payments were mistakenly lowered” and “I apologize for this mistake. Corrections are being made immediately.”

The report said that it is currently unclear how many laid-off employees have been affected.

On the 15th local time, the news that “Tesla, America's largest electric vehicle company, will begin layoffs” shocked American public opinion. According to reports, the company will cut more than 10% of its employees this time, which means 14,000 people will lose their jobs. The media have emphasized that the latest layoffs are “the largest in the history of the company.”

On the day the layoffs were announced, Tesla's stock price fell by more than 5%, and the market value evaporated by more than 30 billion US dollars. The market generally believes that the main reason for Tesla's current layoffs is the slowdown or even decline in sales growth. According to media reviews, the decline in Tesla sales reflects

3rd place$Microsoft (MSFT.US)$It closed down 1.84% and traded at $8.551 billion. Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI may face EU antitrust investigations, sources said.

Microsoft will announce results for the third fiscal quarter of the 2024 fiscal year later this month. Citi said recent surveys suggest Microsoft's revenue related to artificial intelligence may rise unexpectedly. Citi said in a research report that artificial intelligence services are driving the growth trend of Microsoft's cloud business Azure, while people are “keenly interested” in the company's various Copilot products. Furthermore, a more optimistic PC market, combined with conservative guidance, could boost several key Microsoft metrics (including Azure), which should drive the company's earnings per share higher.

Fourth place$Advanced Micro Devices (AMD.US)$The closing was 0.69% higher, and the transaction was $8.16 billion. According to documents disclosed by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on April 17, AMD's chief technology officer and executive vice president Papermaster Mark D sold 16,200 shares of common stock at an average price of $164.25 per share on April 15, worth approximately US$26.60,900.

Additionally, AMD Chairman of the Board and CEO Su Zifeng said at the 10th Lenovo Innovation and Technology Conference Tech World on April 18: “Lenovo is an important partner of Ryzen Al. We are working closely together to develop hardware and software to bring the best AI PC to market.”

5th place$Meta Platforms (META.US)$The closing was 1.54% higher, and the transaction was $7.476 billion. On Thursday local time, US tech giant Meta launched Llama 3, its most powerful open source artificial intelligence (AI) model to catch up with industry leader OpenAI. In the US stock market, Meta shares have risen more than 2% and have risen nearly 43% so far this year.

Meta CEO Zuckerberg claims that Llama 3 has two versions, 8B and 70B, and that the larger version of Llama 3 will have more than 400 billion parameters. Llama 3 is a huge improvement over Llama 2 due to pre-training and fine-tuning instructions.

6th place$Berkshire Hathaway-A (BRK.A.US)$The closing was 0.64% higher, and the transaction was $7.369 billion. Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway issued 263.3 billion yen bonds at a price lower than the trading premium of the past two years because credit market concerns that the Bank of Japan will soon raise interest rates again have eased.

According to the data, this is the largest distribution since Berkshire entered the market in 2019. The bonds issued this time are distributed in seven batches, with terms ranging from 3 to 30 years. It is one of the largest yen transactions carried out by overseas issuers since the Bank of Japan withdrew from the negative interest rate system last month.

7th place$Apple (AAPL.US)$It closed down 0.57% to $7.211 billion. According to a statement issued by Apple on Wednesday (April 17), the company plans to invest more than US$250 million to expand its campus and business in Ang Mo Kio, Singapore.

Halfway through this week, after Apple CEO Tim Cook finished his visit to Vietnam and Indonesia, media sources revealed that Cook will go to Singapore later. At this time, Apple's official website issued a statement stating that it will expand the size of the park in Singapore and expand its business. The US tech giant stated in a statement that this expansion will provide room for growth and new roles in artificial intelligence (AI) and other key functional areas.

Eighth place$Amazon (AMZN.US)$It closed down 1.14% and traded at US$5.531 billion. On April 17, Amazon said it plans to promote its cashier-free technology “Just Walk Out” to more third-party stores this year, while reducing the dependence of its supermarkets on this technology.

According to the online retail giant, about 140 stores currently use this system. Customers can enter the store through a scanning app and then leave the store directly with the product without paying at the cashier. Amazon will more than double that number this year.

9th place$Taiwan Semiconductor (TSM.US)$It closed down 4.86% and traded at US$5.219 billion. TSMC lowered expectations for the expansion of the chip market, warning that the smartphone and PC market is still weak.

The world's largest advanced chip maker lowered its forecast for semiconductor market growth in 2024 (excluding memory chips) to around 10%. CEO Wei Zhejia also lowered the growth forecast for TSMC's leading foundry industry. Meanwhile, the company kept its estimated spending on capacity expansion and upgrades this year between $28 billion and $32 billion.

“Macroeconomic and geopolitical uncertainties remain and may affect consumer confidence and terminal market demand,” Wei Zhejia told analysts during a conference call. TSMC's depository notes in the US fell as much as 6.3%, the biggest intraday decline in more than a year.

11th$UnitedHealth (UNH.US)$The closing was 2.96% higher, and the transaction was US$4.403 billion. Mizuho Securities analyst Ann Hynes maintained the stock's “buy” rating with a target price of $560. The company reported first-quarter revenue of $7.9 billion and a total net loss of $1,221 million.

13th place$Micron Technology (MU.US)$It closed down 3.78% to $3.647 billion. According to reports, Micron is expected to receive 6 billion US dollars in subsidies from the US Department of Commerce to pay for local factory construction projects. This is part of the US effort to move semiconductor production back to the mainland.

According to people familiar with the matter, the matter has not yet been finalized and may be announced as early as next week. In addition to direct subsidies, it is unclear whether Micron Technology, like Intel and TSMC, also plans to accept loans that can be provided under the “Chips and Science Act” (Chips and Science Act, hereinafter referred to as the “Chip Act”) passed in 2022.

15th$Alphabet-A (GOOGL.US)$The closing price was 0.35% higher, and the transaction was $3.101 billion.

Editor/Jeffy