Dow Jones Industrial Average week-long stall continues on Friday

• The Dow Jones held steady near record highs to wrap up an uneventful week.
• After weeks of waiting for Fed momentum, investors were left holding the bag by a cautious Powell.
• Hopes for a new trade truce between the US and China have surfaced, limiting losses for the week.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) is poised to end the trading week near where it started, with price action churning familiar territory around the 47,500 region. Despite the Federal Reserve (Fed) delivering a widely anticipated interest rate cut this week, and the Dow posting a new all-time high just north of 48,000, equity markets remain overall unimpressed this week. Bullish momentum has been thin throughout the week, with disappointment at the Fed's cautious rate-cutting tone offset by hopes that the latest re-ignition in trade tensions between the US and China will be tamped down by the Trump administration's general unwillingness to follow through on its own threats.

AI spend continues to be both the golden goose and Achilles heel of the ongoing tech rally. Key tech giants posted strong earnings on the back of eternally growing demand for hardware architecture to meet the bottomless demand for hardware and storage solutions for learning models. However, a notable lack of profit generation at the actual point of contact between AI solution providers and the general market remains worryingly unmovable.

AI costs continue to rise, good news for the sellers of shovels

Amazon (AMZN) saw a strong Friday rally that single-handedly lifted key indexes into the green for the day, rising after noting a 20% increase in its cloud computing unit's revenue during the third quarter. On the other side of the same coin, Facebook parent Meta Platforms (META) saw some declines through Friday's American market session after softly revealing that its expenses in the LLM space have ballooned to tens of billions of dollars, with functionally no revenue to show for its continued investment in playing catchup to other, more established competitors who remain as equally unprofitable net of spiraling investment costs.

The recent flare-up of trade tensions between the US and China appears to have abated for the time being. While nothing is official and no paperwork currently exists, a common trade strategy for the Trump administration, talks between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping appear to have been at least hypothetically successful, with both sides agreeing to cool down recent protectionist threats for a one-year grace period. China has yet to actually remove any of the trade restrictions it recently imposed, or actually make purchases of US agricultural products at the scale it promised to. In exchange, Donald Trump has promised not to impose new tariffs and trade restrictions that have not yet taken effect. How the trade truce will unfold remains to be seen.

Dow Jones daily chart