Wall Street gains after five red days

Wall Street snapped out of its holiday-season funk on Friday.

The S&P 500 rallied 1.3 per cent for its first gain since Christmas and its best day in nearly two months. Strength for Big Tech stocks helped it break a five-day losing streak, its longest since April, and trim its loss for the week to 0.5 per cent.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 339 points, or 0.8 per cent, and the Nasdaq composite leaped 1.8 per cent.

Nvidia was the strongest force lifting the market after rising 4.5 per cent higher. Other companies caught up in the craze around artificial-intelligence technology also rose, despite criticism that their stock prices have already vaulted too high. Super Micro Computer, which sells servers for AI and other uses, jumped 10.9 per cent, and Palantir Technologies climbed 6.3 per cent.

“While the easy gains in AI may be behind us, we think this rally looks far from over,” according to Solita Marcelli, chief investment officer, Americas, at UBS Global Wealth Management.

Another influential Big Tech stock, Tesla, jumped 8.2 per cent to bounce back from its 6.1 per cent tumble the day before, when it disclosed it delivered fewer electric vehicles in the last three months of 2024 than analysts expected.

Rival Rivian soared 24.5 per cent after saying it delivered more than 14,000 vehicles during the latest quarter. That was more than analysts expected.

On the losing end of Wall Street was US Steel, which fell 6.5 per cent after President Joe Biden blocked a nearly US$15 billion deal proposed by Japan’s Nippon Steel to buy its Pittsburgh-based rival.

Beer, wine and liquor companies sank after US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy warned about the direct link between alcohol consumption and increased cancer risk. He called for an update on the health warning label on alcoholic drinks, as well as for a reassessment of guidelines for alcohol consumption to account for cancer risk.

Molson Coors Beverage fell 3.4 per cent. Brown-Forman, the distillery behind Jack Daniel’s, lost 2.5 per cent.

All told, the S&P 500 rose 73.92 points to 5,942.47. The Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 339.86 to 42,732.13, and the Nasdaq composite jumped 340.88 to 19,621.68.

Wall Street’s post-Christmas pullback dimmed its shine by only a bit following two stellar years for US stock indexes. They’ve vaulted to records after the US economy managed to keep growing despite high interest rates that have helped push inflation nearly all the way down to the Federal Reserve’s 2.0 per cent target.

But even though the economy and job market still look solid at the moment, the path ahead is not assured. Part of the reason the S&P 500 set more than 50 all-time highs last year was because of the expectation that the Fed would keep cutting interest rates through 2025, after it began easing them in September.

Traders are now ratcheting back their expectations for coming cuts to rates. Inflation is proving to be stubborn as the Fed tries to wring out the last percentage point of improvement to get inflation down to 2.0 per cent. Worries are also rising that tariffs and other policies coming from President-elect Donald Trump could put upward pressure on inflation. All the while, critics say US stock prices simply look too expensive after rising so much faster than corporate profits.

The threat of Trump’s tariffs has also hurt stock markets overseas. For China, it’s compounded worries about the world’s second-largest economy, which is already contending with a struggling property market and other challenges.

Stocks dropped 1.6 per cent in Shanghai to bring their loss for the week to 5.6 per cent, though they climbed 0.7 per cent in Hong Kong to trim their weekly loss to 1.6 per cent. European stock indexes also fell.

South Korea’s Kospi index jumped 1.8 per cent after the acting president and finance minister, Choi Sang-mok, promised to do more to stabilise the economy. The country is in the midst of a political crisis that has seen two heads of state impeached in under a month.

In the bond market, Treasury yields climbed after a report on US manufacturing came in better than feared.

The report from the Institute for Supply Management showed another month of contraction for manufacturers, the 25th in the last 26. But it wasn’t as severe as economists expected. Manufacturing has been one of the areas of the economy hit hardest by the high interest rates of recent years.

The 10-year Treasury yield rose to 4.59 per cent from 4.56 per cent late Thursday. The two-year Treasury yield, which more closely tracks expectations for Fed action, also rose, up to 4.28 per cent from 4.25 per cent late Thursday.

AP