US stocks on Friday extended their rally and the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ Composite indices scored their biggest weekly percentage gains since the US elections in early November last year, boosted by optimism over earnings, stimulus talks and progress on vaccine rollouts.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 rose for a fifth straight session in their longest streak of gains since August last year, while the S&P 500 and NASDAQ posted record closing highs for a second day in a row.
A smaller-than-expected rebound in the US labor market last month highlighted the need for more government aid.
The US Department of Labor on Friday reported a 49,000 increase in non-farm payrolls last month, but job losses in manufacturing and construction.
US President Joe Biden and his Democratic allies in the US Congress moved ahead with their US$1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package as lawmakers approved a budget plan that would allow them to muscle Biden’s plan through in the coming weeks without Republican support.
“The upcoming package of stimulus is going to be big,” said Alan Lancz, president of Alan Lancz & Associates Inc, an investment advisory firm based in Toledo, Ohio.
“You have a situation where there’s a lot of cash on sidelines and bonds have really underperformed, so that’s helped some sectors that have really done poorly,” he said.
Upbeat earnings this week have also supported investor optimism. So far, stronger-than-expected corporate results in the fourth quarter have driven up analysts’ expectations, and S&P 500 companies are on track to post earnings growth for the period instead of a decline as initially expected.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average on Friday rose 92.38 points, or 0.3 percent, to 31,148.24, the S&P 500 gained 15.09 points, or 0.39 percent, at 3,886.83 and the NASDAQ Composite added 78.55 points, or 0.57 percent, at 13,856.30.
For the week, the S&P 500 gained 4.65 percent, the NASDAQ added 6.01 percent and the Dow increased 3.89 percent. The small-cap Russell 2000 index rose 7.7 percent for the week, its biggest weekly percentage gain since the week that ended on June 5 last year.
The CBOE Volatility index fell and had its biggest weekly point drop since the week that ended on Nov. 6 last year.
The S&P 500 technology index ended down 0.2 percent after hitting a record high earlier in the session.
Johnson & Johnson rose 1.5 percent after the drugmaker said it had asked US health regulators to authorize its single-dose COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use.
Shares of GameStop Corp, caught in a social media-hyped trading frenzy, rose 19.2 percent on Friday, after online broker Robinhood lifted all the buying curbs imposed at the height of the battle between amateur investors and Wall Street hedge funds.
Clover Health Investments Corp shares ended up 5.7 percent. It said it would cooperate with a request from the US Securities and Exchange Commission. US regulators are following up on a report about Clover by short-selling specialist Hindenburg Research.
Advancing issues outnumbered declining ones on the New York Stock Exchange by a 2.33-to-1 ratio; on NASDAQ, a 1.94-to-1 ratio favored advancers.
The S&P 500 posted 34 new 52-week highs and no new lows; the NASDAQ Composite recorded 286 new highs and four new lows.
Volume on US exchanges was 13.65 billion shares, compared with the 15.5 billion average for the full session over the past 20 trading days.
Cairo’s new monorail slices across the city skyline, running above the familiar chaos of blaring horns and aging buses’ exhaust fumes that mark rush hour below. The US$4.5 billion monorail, opened this month, is among Egypt’s most prominent new transport projects, part of a debt-funded infrastructure drive criticized for sapping state finances while bringing limited benefits to most of the country’s 109 million people. “It feels like you’re in a different country,” said Ramy Sayed, a restaurant manager, aboard a driverless Innovia 300 train. “No noise, no traffic, we’re not used to this.” The eastern line runs 56km from the bustling middle-class
Taiwanese firms have increased investment in the Philippines in recent years as Manila’s ties with Washington deepen and global supply chains continue to shift away from China, an expert at the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) said yesterday. The Philippines had not been among Taiwanese investors’ top choices in Southeast Asia, CIER Taiwan ASEAN Studies Center director Kristy Hsu (徐遵慈) said at a seminar in Taipei. However, Taiwan’s investment in the country has grown significantly since the COVID-19 pandemic, reaching US $257 million last year, a high in recent years, she said. Although Taiwan’s total investment in the Philippines still lags
Intel Corp regards Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) as a longstanding partner, as the US chipmaker would continue outsourcing production of advanced chips to TSMC, Intel chief executive officer Lip-Bu Tan (陳立武) said yesterday. “I don’t look at people as competitors. I look at the collaboration... Nvidia is also, you know, a good friend,” Tan told a news conference following his keynote speech at the Computex trade show in Taipei. “It’s a very trusted partnership for us... We are a big, top customer for them, and we’re going to continue doing that,” he said, referring to TSMC, the world’s largest foundry
Artificial intelligence (AI) agents would supplant smartphones as the center of people’s digital lives, fundamentally reshaping personal devices and driving a major computing upgrade cycle, Qualcomm Inc CEO Cristiano Amon said yesterday. In his keynote speech for this year’s Computex trade show in Taipei, Amon said that the rise of "agentic AI" — AI systems capable of reasoning, planning and carrying out tasks autonomously — would transform how people interact with technology across phones, PCs, vehicles and wearable devices. Describing the technology as the next major evolution in computing, Amon said that "2026 is the year of agents.” For decades, smartphones have sat
RSS