US equity markets mostly higher as trade fears subsided a little - Dow fell -42-points or -0.17%, unwinding an earlier gain of over >100-points to record its seventh consecutive decline - its longest losing streak since March last year. General Electric Co fell -0.5%, with S&P Dow Jones Indices announcing on Tuesday that it would remove GE from the Dow Jones Industrial Average, where it has been a fixture for more than a century. GE will be replaced by Walgreens Boots Alliance (up +5.3%). The broader S&P500 added +0.17%, with 7 of the 11 primary sectors closing in the black. Starbucks dropped -9.1% - its worst single session decline since July 2017 - after announcing it plans to close more than 150 stores in the next year and after lowering its sales guidance for the third quarter. NASDAQ rose +0.72% to a fresh record closing high (7,781.51), with Facebook Inc (up +2.3% and surging past us$200 per share) and Netflix Inc (+2.9%) posting solid gains. Facebook closed at a record high after the company said its Instagram platform now has 1 billion users.Instagram also announced a new app for watching "long-form, vertical video," which will compete with Alphabet Inc.'s (up +0.46%) YouTube and Snap Inc.'s (down -3.83%) Snap. The small capitalisation Russell 2000 index rose +0.8% to a fresh record closing high (1,706.92) also. On the trade war front, the Wall Street Journal reported that the US ambassador to Germany had met with the leaders of German car makers BMW AG (down -0.71%), Volkswagen AG (up +1.32%) and Daimler AG (-0.74%), where they pitched the idea of ending car tariffs between the US and the EU.
