Major US stock indices on Friday gained, with the S&P 500 ending at a record-high close, as energy stocks bounced back along with oil prices and US job growth rebounded.
US non-farm payrolls last month surged by 211,000 jobs after a paltry gain of 79,000 in March and the unemployment rate dropped to 4.4 percent, near a 10-year low.
Energy was the best performing sector, rising 1.6 percent, after falling sharply a day earlier.
Photo: Reuters
Oil prices rebounded following assurances by Saudi Arabia that Russia is ready to join OPEC in extending supply cuts.
“There has been and probably will continue to be a little bit of a fear that perhaps the economy isn’t accelerating like people thought it would or want it to,” said Chuck Carlson, chief executive officer at Horizon Investment Services LLC in Hammond, Indiana.
“So any day where you get a little bit more confirmation that perhaps the economy is okay — and we got that today in the sense of an okay jobs report, oil is up, transports are doing better today — that probably is something that helped the broader market,” Carlson said.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 55.47 points, or 0.26 percent, to 21,006.94, the S&P 500 gained 9.77 points, or 0.41 percent, to 2,399.29 and the NASDAQ Composite added 25.42 points, or 0.42 percent, to 6,100.76.
For the week, the Dow rose 0.3 percent from 20,940.51, the S&P gained 0.6 percent from 2,384.20 and the NASDAQ Composite rose 0.9 percent from 6,047.61.
After seven sessions of not moving more than 0.2 percent in either direction, the S&P 500 on Friday eclipsed that range as stocks strengthened late in the day.
The S&P 500 has gained 12.1 percent since US President Donald Trump’s Nov. 8 last year election, fueled by his plans for tax cuts, infrastructure spending and deregulation.
However, the rally had slowed as some investors questioned Trump’s ability to enact his agenda.
The US Federal Reserve left interest rates unchanged at its policy meeting this week.
The central bank downplayed weak first-quarter economic growth while emphasizing the strong labor market, in a sign it was still on track for two more rate rises this year.
Investors are pricing in a 75 percent chance of a hike in June, according to Thomson Reuters data.
In corporate news, IBM Corp shares fell 2.5 percent after Warren Buffett said he sold about one-third of Berkshire Hathaway Inc’s stake in the company.
Earnings season has come in generally above expectations, encouraging investors.
Shares of health insurer Cigna Co and IT services provider Cognizant Tech Solutions Corp rose after their respective reports.
Advancing issues outnumbered declining ones on the New York Stock Exchange by a 2.66-to-1 ratio; on NASDAQ, a 1.39-to-1 ratio favored advancers.
The S&P 500 posted 55 new 52-week highs and no new lows; the NASDAQ Composite recorded 123 new highs and 67 new lows.
About 6.5 billion shares changed hands in US exchanges on Friday, just below the 6.6 billion daily average over the past 20 sessions.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts