NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. stocks posted their best day since 2022 after encouraging news on the jobs market. The S&P 500 rose 2.3%, continuing the rollercoaster ride of recent days. The Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 1.8% and the Nasdaq Composite gained 2.9%. Treasury yields also rose in the bond market, a sign that investors are less worried about the economy after a report showed fewer workers filed for unemployment benefits last week. Eli Lilly added to the market leader, rising 9.5% after it posted better-than-expected earnings for the spring. Shares of major technology companies rallied.
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NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. stocks recovered Thursday after a better than expected report on unemployment eased concerns about the Economic slowdown.
The S&P 500 rose 2.2% in late trading, on track for its best day since the first week of 2023. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 664 points, or 1.7%, just under an hour before the close, and the Nasdaq Composite was 2.7% higher, with Nvidia and other big tech stocks leading the way.
On the bond market, yields on US government bonds also rose, a sign that investors are less concerned about the economy after a report showed that fewer U.S. workers filed for unemployment benefits last week, a figure better than economists expected.
It was exactly a week ago, worse than expected data on unemployment claims fueled fears that the The US Federal Reserve has kept Interest charges to remain at a level that is too high and slows down the economy for too long in order to Defeat inflationThis has helped to boost the markets staggertogether with an interest rate increase by the Bank of Japan which caused shockwaves around the world by a popular profession at some hedge funds.
Worst of all, the S&P 500 fell about 9% from its record high last month. Such declines are not uncommon on Wall Street, and 10% “corrections” occur about every one to two years.
What made this decline particularly scary was how quickly it happened. A measure of how much investors are paying to protect themselves against future declines in the S&P 500 briefly rose to its highest level since the COVID crash of 2020.
Still, according to strategists at BNP Paribas, the market swings are more akin to a “positioning-induced crash” caused by too many investors entering similar trades and then exiting them together, rather than the start of a long-term downmarket following a recession.
They say it is more like the “Flash Crash” from 2010 than the global financial crisis of 2008 or the recession caused by the pandemic in 2020.
Of course, despite all long-term forecasts, there were rapid market changes last week.
“Today’s unemployment data may ease some of the concerns raised by last week’s weak jobs report,” said Chris Larkin, managing director of trading and investing at Morgan Stanley’s E-Trade. “But with inflation data due next week and the stock market still enduring its biggest decline of the year, it’s unclear how much this will affect sentiment.”
Meanwhile, major US companies continue to present earnings reports for the spring, most of which are better than analysts expected.
Eli Lilly rose 9.4%, leading the market after the company higher profits and sales than Wall Street had predicted. Sales of its diabetes drug Mounjaro and its weight-loss product Zepbound are booming, and the company has raised its financial forecast for the year.
Shares of the big technology companies also rose, recouping some of their sharp losses from last month. After a handful of them almost single-handedly drove the S&P 500 to dozens of all-time highs this year, the group known as “The glory seven” lost momentum last month as investors criticized its overly high prices Hype about artificial intelligence Technology.
The performance of these handful of stocks has additional implications for the S&P 500 and other indices, as these companies are by far the most valuable on the market. NVIDIAwhich has become the poster child of AI trading, rose 5.7%, cutting its loss for the week so far to 2.5%, and was the single biggest force pushing the S&P 500 higher on the day.
Gains of 1.6 percent at Apple and 3.7 percent at Meta Platforms were also major growth drivers alongside Eli Lilly.
They helped offset an 11.8 percent decline at McKesson, which beat analysts’ earnings expectations last quarter but fell short of expectations on revenue. The company said growth in its medical-surgical business had slowed.
Bumble, the Texas-based dating app, lost nearly a third of its value, or 31.2%, after its third-quarter revenue forecast fell well short of Wall Street’s.
In the bond market, the yield on 10-year Treasuries rose to 4.00% from 3.95% late Wednesday.
On foreign stock markets, indices in Asia and Europe were mixed. In Japan, where some of the wildest market moves took place, the Nikkei 225 fell 0.7%. This looked like a wave after the sharp fluctuations of Decrease of 12.4% and was at 10.2% at the beginning of the week.
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AP business writers Yuri Kageyama and Matt Ott contributed.
