The Tribune

By CHRIS ILLING

CCO @ Activtrades Corp

August is behind us and markets worldwide had a more or less quiet month. In New York, caution about the forthcoming labour market report has somewhat pushed the hopes of an interest rate pause by the US Federal Reserve into the background. The leading index, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, slipped gradually until the end of August and posted a loss of 2.4 percent.

The market-wide S&P 500 fell also by around 1.5 percent, and the technology-heavy and therefore particularly interest-sensitive selection index, Nasdaq 100, closed lower by approximately 1.6 percent.

But there were also some winners this month. SAP competitor, Salesforce, has increased its forecast for the current quarter, and its share price is rising sharply. Salesforce specialises in enterprise software for customer management and also offers, among other things, the acquired office communication service, Slack.

Salesforce has increased its forecast for the current quarter. The business software specialist expects sales of $8.71bn, when analysts on average had expected $8.66bn. The shares rose by more than 7 percent last week.

In the last quarter, Salesforce increased sales by a good 11 percent year-on-year to $8.6bn. The bottom line is that profits rose from $68m to just under $1.27bn in the quarter that ended in July. At the beginning of the year, the group resorted to, among other things, job cuts in order to become more profitable.

SAP’s share price development lags far behind that of its US competitor. The company is Salesforce’s largest competitor. SAP’s shares only reacted to the figures from Salesforce with moderate gains at the end of last week.

SAP shares have gained a good third this year so far, making them one of the DAX favourites. With an increase of 62 percent since the turn of the year, Salesforce is the leader in the US index, Dow Jones Industrial. Analysts expect that In order to trigger new impulses on the upside, the SAP price would now have to rise above the November high from 2021 at 129.74 euros, and the current 2023 record of 129.98 euros from last Thursday.

If the breakout above the 130 EUR mark is successful, even the record high of 143.32 EUR would gradually come within reach. Both share CFDs are available on the ActivTrader platform.