Top Stock Market Highlights of the Week: NASDAQ’s Record Run, UOL Group, Meta Platforms’ Threads and HDB Resale Volumes and Prices

Welcome to this week’s edition of top stock market highlights.

NASDAQ Composite Index (INDEXNASDAQ: .IXIC)

It was a bloodbath for the NASDAQ Composite Index last year when it shaved off a third of its value in a painful year for growth stocks.

No one would have expected the bellwether technology stock index to make a sharp comeback.

But with the first half of 2023 over, the NASDAQ Composite Index has posted its best first-half performance in the last four decades.

The index gained more than 31% with the top 100 stocks within the index advancing by the largest first-half gain on record at 39%.

In addition, the most valuable company in the world, Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL), also saw its market capitalisation cross the US$3 trillion threshold convincingly.

The performance came as a surprise as the US Federal Reserve remained hawkish as it warned that more interest rate hikes were necessary to combat inflation and bring it down to its target of 2%.

UOL Group Limited (SGX: U14)

UOL Group, a leading property and hospitality group with total assets of around S$22 billion, has announced the divestment of Parkroyal Kitchener Road to Midtown Properties Pte Ltd for S$525 million.

The hotel has 542 rooms and is located near Mustafa Centre and City Square Mall and is linked to the Farrer Park MRT Station.

Carolyn Choo, the CEO of Midtown Properties, says that the hotel will be rebranded and launched after the purchase is completed by the fourth quarter of this year.

This disposal allows UOL Group to unlock the value of its investment in the hotel and the property development outfit will recognise a gain of approximately S$446.2 million.

The sale price is also 24.1% higher than the independent valuation of S$423 million as of 31 December 2022.

On a pro-forma basis, this sale will lift UOL Group’s net tangible asset per share by 4.2% to S$13.08 while 2022’s earnings per share will nearly double from S$0.5824 to S$1.1194.

Meta Platforms (NASDAQ: META)

Meta Platforms launched a new app called Threads which is a new text-based social media platform similar to Twitter.

The move came after Twitter, headed by CEO Elon Musk of Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA), imposed a temporary limit on the number of posts that can be read daily on the platform.

Threads allows users to post and engage in real-time conversations, similar to Twitter, and you can also like, repost and decide who can reply to specific threads.

Within seven hours of Threads’ launch on July 6, Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the app had seen 10 million sign-ups.

After a full day had passed, the number of sign-ups tripled to 30 million, posing a challenge to Twitter.

Threads has an advantage in that it is connected to Instagram, another one of Meta’s products, allowing users to instantly fill the Threads app with people they are interested in following.

Elon Musk is not pleased with this development and is now threatening legal action, claiming that Threads has violated Twitter’s “intellectual property rights”.

Twitter claims that Meta had poached its ex-employees and assigned them to design a copycat app using the former’s trade secrets and other intellectual property.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

But for now, investors can expect Threads to continue its momentum and garner more users as it opens up yet another potential revenue source for Meta.

HDB resale volumes and prices

HDB resale prices have continued their upward climb in June, inching up 0.6% compared with May.

On a year-on-year basis, prices have risen by 7.3%, according to flash estimates from real estate portal SRX and property agency 99.co.

Transaction volume, however, took a dip to 1,858 in June from 2,260 in May.

Volume was also 13% lower than June 2022’s transactions and PropNex (SGX: OYY) CEO Ismail Gafoor attributed this to price resistance setting in among buyers.

A bumper crop of 13,000 HDB Built-to-Order (BTO) flats will be offered for sale in the second half of 2023, diverting attention away from the resale market.

These flats are located in estates such as Queenstown, Bedok, Bishan, Tengah, and Woodlands, among others.

HDB remains on track to launch a total of 100,000 flats from 2021 to 2025, and this should help to ease the lack of supply.

With the increase in BTO numbers, Hutton Asia’s CEO Mark Yip expects HDB resale prices to moderate and increase by less than 5% for this year.

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Disclosure: Royston Yang owns shares of Meta Platforms and Apple.

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