Trading results for 16 June 2025
“What was that, Barrymore?” – “Porridge, sir...” That, perhaps, best sums up last Friday, when investors staged a broad-based sell-off across nearly the entire market. Yes, there was a reason for it – the war in the Middle East, which is still ongoing.
However, on Monday, market participants suddenly looked at it all from a different angle and decided that, really, nothing too terrible was happening. One war today, another tomorrow – what difference does it make? In short: porridge, sir! So the fear was brushed aside and off they went shopping. That, in essence, was the simple rationale behind the rally – and it played out brilliantly.
From the opening of the main session, the market moved higher and stayed there right through to the final bell, with little sign of anxiety. Only defence-sector stocks showed slight declines – logical enough, given that they were among Friday’s main beneficiaries. In short, everything returned to normal, and the indexes quickly and effortlessly regained all the ground lost over the previous week – with the exception of the good old Dow (DJIA-30), which rose by 0.75% on Monday after losing 1.32% the week before.
Its peers performed even better. The main U.S. benchmark, the S&P 500, gained nearly 1% (+0.94%), more than double its losses from the prior week. The NASDAQ Composite, meanwhile, was the clear leader, climbing an impressive 1.52% on the back of strong demand for chip and semiconductor stocks.
Among those, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) was the standout performer in the S&P 500, gaining nearly 9% (+8.81%) in a single day. The surge followed a target price upgrade from $125 to $140 by analysts at Piper Sandler, who cited the competitiveness of AMD’s newly unveiled products – the Instinct MI350 accelerators and the MI400 “Helios” server racks – as a key factor. According to the analyst, AMD is now well-positioned to compete with Nvidia (NVDA) in the AI hardware space.
As for the ITS family of indexes, they largely mirrored global and U.S. market trends. The ITS World Index (ITSW) and the ITS Shariah Index (ITSS) recorded solid gains of 0.69% and 0.75% respectively. The ITSS might have risen even further if not for some localised profit-taking in pharmaceutical stocks on Monday.
In fact, only 8 of the 30 companies in the ITSS ended the day in the red – six of them from the Healthcare sector. Meanwhile, the leaders in both indexes were all tech firms, led once again by AMD, along with major Big Tech names such as Adobe Inc (ADBE, +2.57%), Cisco Systems, Inc (CSCO, +2.22%) and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing ADR (TSM, +2.17%). Encouragingly, the strong demand for these stocks suggests that investors remain optimistic about the current state of the market.