The S&P 500 and Dow on Friday rose in a broad-based rally with technology, healthcare and financial stocks providing the biggest lift as investors bet on a recovery that is expected to deliver the fastest economic growth since 1984.
The S&P 500 and the Dow ended a seesaw week higher as investors rebalancing their portfolios at the quarter’s end continued to buy stocks that stand to benefit from a growing economy, while they added some beaten-down technology shares.
The NASDAQ also ended higher as less popular tech shares advanced, but posted its second weekly decline in a row.
Wall Street surged in the last half hour of trading, lifting all three indicies more than 1 percent. The S&P 500 and Dow eked out record closing highs.
The Russell 1000 value index, which includes energy, banks and industrial stocks, has gained more than 10 percent this year, outperforming its counterpart the Russell 1000 growth index, which is just above break-even for the year.
Some of the tech heavyweights slid, such as Tesla Inc and Google parent Alphabet Inc, but Microsoft Corp and Facebook Inc bucked the trend, helping lift the S&P 500 and NASDAQ higher.
“It is less a move out of technology than a move that evidences a broader appetite for equities to include both growth and value,” said John Stoltzfus, chief investment strategist at Oppenheimer Asset Management in New York.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 453.4 points, or 1.39 percent, to 33,072.88. The S&P 500 gained 65.02 points, or 1.66 percent, to 3,974.54 and the NASDAQ Composite added 161.05 points, or 1.24 percent, to 13,138.72.
For the week, the S&P rose 1.57 percent and the Dow 1.36 percent, while the NASDAQ slipped 0.58 percent.
Volume on US exchanges was 12.23 billion shares, compared with the 13.67 billion average for the full session over the past 20 trading days.
The US Federal Reserve last week raised its GDP estimate for 2021 to 6.5 percent from 4.2 percent and many economists expect still faster growth, which has spurred fears the economy could run too hot and force the Fed to raise interest rates.
“It has been hard to restrain our US growth forecast in recent months. We’ve been upgrading our estimates almost as fast as we lowered them a year ago,” Carl Tannenbaum, chief economist at Northern Trust, told the Reuters Global Markets Forum.
Bank stocks gained 1.9 percent as the Fed said it would lift income-based restrictions on bank dividends and share buybacks for “most firms” in June after its next round of stress tests.
The yield on benchmark 10-year US Treasury notes rose to 1.66 percent, lower than a spike last week to 1.75 percent that sparked a sell-off on inflation fears and a potential Fed rate hike — something the Fed has pledged not to do.
The market is concerned that all of a sudden the Fed is forced to tighten against its repeated mantra that it will not, State Street Global Markets senior global macro strategist Marvin Loh said.
“The real concern is that things overheat and the Fed might be forced to change its mind,” he said.
Energy stocks jumped 2.6 percent, tracking a boost in crude prices after a giant container ship blocking the Suez Canal spurred fears of a supply squeeze.
Ten of the 11 major S&P sectors rose, with only the communication services index in the red.
Advancing issues outnumbered declining ones on the NYSE by a 3.3-to-1 ratio; on NASDAQ, a 1.81-to-1 ratio favored advancers.
The S&P 500 posted 65 new 52-week highs and no new lows; the NASDAQ Composite recorded 82 new highs and 51 new lows.
When Lika Megreladze was a child, life in her native western Georgian region of Guria revolved around tea. Her mother worked for decades as a scientist at the Soviet Union’s Institute of Tea and Subtropical Crops in the village of Anaseuli, Georgia, perfecting cultivation methods for a Georgian tea industry that supplied the bulk of the vast communist state’s brews. “When I was a child, this was only my mum’s workplace. Only later I realized that it was something big,” she said. Now, the institute lies abandoned. Yellowed papers are strewn around its decaying corridors, and a statue of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin
UNIFYING OPPOSITION: Numerous companies have registered complaints over the potential levies, bringing together rival automakers in voicing their reservations US President Donald Trump is readying plans for industry-specific tariffs to kick in alongside his country-by-country duties in two weeks, ramping up his push to reshape the US’ standing in the global trading system by penalizing purchases from abroad. Administration officials could release details of Trump’s planned 50 percent duty on copper in the days before they are set to take effect on Friday next week, a person familiar with the matter said. That is the same date Trump’s “reciprocal” levies on products from more than 100 nations are slated to begin. Trump on Tuesday said that he is likely to impose tariffs
ELECTRONICS BOOST: A predicted surge in exports would likely be driven by ICT products, exports of which have soared 84.7 percent from a year earlier, DBS said DBS Bank Ltd (星展銀行) yesterday raised its GDP growth forecast for Taiwan this year to 4 percent from 3 percent, citing robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI)-related exports and accelerated shipment activity, which are expected to offset potential headwinds from US tariffs. “Our GDP growth forecast for 2025 is revised up to 4 percent from 3 percent to reflect front-loaded exports and strong AI demand,” Singapore-based DBS senior economist Ma Tieying (馬鐵英) said in an online briefing. Taiwan’s second-quarter performance beat expectations, with GDP growth likely surpassing 5 percent, driven by a 34.1 percent year-on-year increase in exports, Ma said, citing government
HELPING HAND: Approving the sale of H20s could give China the edge it needs to capture market share and become the global standard, a US representative said The US President Donald Trump administration’s decision allowing Nvidia Corp to resume shipments of its H20 artificial intelligence (AI) chips to China risks bolstering Beijing’s military capabilities and expanding its capacity to compete with the US, the head of the US House Select Committee on Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party said. “The H20, which is a cost-effective and powerful AI inference chip, far surpasses China’s indigenous capability and would therefore provide a substantial increase to China’s AI development,” committee chairman John Moolenaar, a Michigan Republican, said on Friday in a letter to US Secretary of
RSS