10 Firms Defy Market Slump, Record Double-Digit Gains Last Week

The stock market may have taken a beating for most of the week, but it was able to recover losses on Friday, as investors gobbled up shares while weighing the impact of the US-China trade war.

Among all major indices, the tech-heavy Nasdaq registered the highest gain, up 7.29 percent, followed by the S&P 500 with 5.7 percent, and the Dow Jones by 4.95 percent.

Ten companies, predominantly in the gold and biopharmaceutical sectors, were the week’s top performers as investors sought haven from their stocks amid market uncertainties.

In this article, we have identified last week’s 10 highest gainers and detailed the reasons behind their gains.

To come up with the list, we considered only the stocks with a $2 billion market capitalization and $5 million trading volume.

The week-on-week prices were based on the companies’ closing prices on Friday as against on April 4, or a week earlier.

Photo by George Morina on Pexels

10. Newmont Corp. (NYSE:NEM)

Shares of Newmont Corp. surged by 24.4 percent week-on-week, finishing Friday’s trading at $54.97 versus the $44.18 on April 4, as investor funds flocked to gold miners amid the surge in the prices of gold.

During the past trading week, gold prices surged to record highs twice as investors turned to gold for safe haven amid economic uncertainties brought about by the ongoing trade tensions between the United States and China.

NEM also saw five consecutive days of rally last week, with sentiment helped by an investment bank’s rating upgrade in the company’s stock to Buy from Neutral previously, while giving it a higher price target of $60 versus $50 prior. The new price target represented a 9-percent upside from NEM’s closing price on Friday.

NEM is a US-based gold miner that owns various mining sites across the US, Canada, Mexico, Dominican Republic, Australia, Ghana, Argentina, Peru, and Suriname.

9. IonQ Inc. (NYSE:IONQ)

IonQ Inc. saw its share prices jump by 26.16 percent week-on-week at $26.09 versus $20.68 on April 4 after being one of the 15 companies tapped by the Department of Defense to explore the possibility of building a useful quantum computer that can achieve utility-scale operation.

According to the DND, IONQ and its 14 quantum computing peers will work with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to scale their technology toward creating a utility-scale quantum computer.

The companies will provide “comprehensive technical details of their concepts to show that they hold water and could plausibly lead to a transformative, fault-tolerant quantum computer in under 10 years.”

Companies that will successfully complete the first stage will advance in the next year-long phase, during which DARPA will analyze their research and development approach.

A final stage will follow, where the QBI independent verification and validation (IV&V) team will test the firms’ computer hardware.