Sunday Money: HPE Jumps 21% to Lead a Big Week for Tech Hardware

Grab a coffee – this is Sunday Money, our weekly look back at the stocks, coins and numbers that moved markets. This week’s biggest story belongs to Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPE), the server and networking group that used to be the “enterprise” half of the old HP empire. Its shares jumped 21.01% over the week to close at $62.10, comfortably the best performance of any stock we tracked – a move big enough to make HPE the week’s standout splash, even against a backdrop of a mostly flat broader market.

Context matters here: the S&P 500 (via the SPY ETF) actually slipped 0.34% over the same week to 764.48, the Nasdaq 100 (QQQ) eased 0.35% to 714.89, and the Dow (DIA) fell a touch further, down 0.62% to 525.91. So HPE wasn’t riding a rising tide – it was swimming hard against one, which makes the size of the gain more striking, not less.

Four more movers worth knowing about

Skyworks Solutions (NASDAQ: SWKS), which makes the radio-frequency chips that let phones and other devices talk wirelessly, had almost as dramatic a week, climbing 20.04% to $89.37 – the only other stock in our sample to post a double-digit percentage gain. Behind those two, a cluster of related hardware names also had a good week without quite matching that pace: HP Inc (NYSE: HPQ), the printers-and-PCs business that split from HPE back in 2015, rose 10.56% to $35.45; Dell Technologies (NYSE: DELL) gained 9.80% to end the week at $569.84; and Coherent (NYSE: COHR), a maker of lasers and optical components used in data centres and manufacturing, rose 9.22% to $305.66. Taken together, five of the market’s best-performing stocks this week came from the same broad hardware and components corner – though it’s really HPE and Skyworks that delivered the headline-grabbing double-digit jumps, with the other three putting in solid, if less spectacular, high-single-digit gains.

Not every corner of the market had a week to remember. Cooper Companies (NASDAQ: COO), the contact lens and medical device maker, was the week’s heaviest faller, down 22.83% to $53.70 – a drop steep enough to stand out even in a week with several sharp declines. Casey’s General Stores (NASDAQ: CASY), the Midwest petrol station and convenience chain, fell 19.35% to $612.01, while FactSet Research Systems (NYSE: FDS), the financial data and analytics provider that Wall Street itself relies on, dropped 14.91% to $259.71. Rounding out the week’s fallers, Copart (NASDAQ: CPRT), the vehicle auction and salvage group, slid 10.80% to $29.97, and Builders FirstSource (NYSE: BLDR), a supplier of building materials to homebuilders, lost 10.62% to close at $59.00.

Crypto corner

Crypto had a quieter, choppier week. Bitcoin (BTC) slipped 3.41% against the dollar to $77,162, according to Binance spot market data, while Solana (SOL) fell harder, down 5.41% to $100.74. Ether (ETH) was the exception, edging up 0.75% to $2,517.89 – a small gain, but a gain nonetheless in a week when its two big peers were both in the red.

The week in numbers

A few figures from the wider economy help explain the mood. The 10-year US Treasury yield – essentially the interest rate the US government pays to borrow money for a decade, and a benchmark that ripples through mortgage rates and company borrowing costs worldwide – rose to 4.95%, up from 4.83%, according to Federal Reserve data. The shorter 2-year yield climbed too, to 4.56% from 4.43%, per the same Federal Reserve series, while the gap between the two – the 10y-2y spread, a well-watched signal of how investors see the economy’s medium-term prospects – narrowed slightly to 0.33 percentage points from 0.39, according to Federal Reserve data. Meanwhile, the price of crude oil, specifically the US benchmark known as West Texas Intermediate, rose to $97.26 a barrel from $94.21, per Federal Reserve figures – a move worth watching given how quickly higher oil prices can feed through to petrol pumps and haulage costs.

Put those together and you get a week where borrowing got a touch more expensive, oil ticked higher, and the major indices barely budged – yet individual stocks still swung by 20% or more in both directions. It’s a reminder that even in a “quiet” week for the market as a whole, plenty of money is changing hands underneath the surface.

Until next week

That’s the week that was: a hardware rally led by HPE and Skyworks, a rough patch for contact lenses and convenience stores, bitcoin cooling off while ether held steady, and bond yields drifting higher in the background. None of it is a forecast for what comes next – markets have a habit of humbling anyone who tries that – but it’s a fair snapshot of where money moved. We’ll be back next Sunday with the next instalment.

This article is for information only and is not investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any asset. Markets move quickly; figures are correct as sourced at the time of writing. Always do your own research before making financial decisions.