Wall Street climbs as Big Tech recovers following recent drop

U.S. stocks closed broadly higher Monday on Wall Street, clawing back some of the losses from their worst week since April.

The Standard & Poor’s 500 rose 1.1%, breaking a three-day losing streak. It was the first gain for the benchmark index since it set an all-time high Tuesday.

The Dow Jones industrial average added 0.3%, and the Nasdaq composite climbed 1.6%.

The gains were broad, with more than three-quarters of the stocks in the S&P 500 closing higher, although tech stocks accounted for much of the rally.

Nvidia rose 4.8%, and other Big Tech stocks likewise regained some of their sharp drops from the week before to support the market. They had sputtered amid criticism that they’d grown too expensive after rocketing so high and being the main reasons for Wall Street’s run to records. Two of them, Alphabet and Tesla, will report Tuesday how much profit they earned during the spring in a big test. Alphabet rose 2.3% and Tesla gained 5.1%.

Treasury yields mostly climbed in the bond market after President Biden said he won’t run for reelection. The move could cause the unwinding of some of the market’s “Trump trade,” which took off after Biden’s weak performance in a debate last month raised expectations for a win by former President Trump.

Bank stocks had climbed on forecasts for lighter regulations in the event of a Republican sweep, for example, and longer-term Treasury yields climbed more than short-term ones on expectations for policies that could push up the U.S. government’s already high debt.

But Biden’s stepping aside over the weekend wasn’t that big of a surprise for the market. “It was a matter of when, not if,” said Brian Jacobsen, chief economist at Annex Wealth Management.

“This could lower the odds of Trump winning, but the Democrats have to rally around a candidate first.”

The yield on the 10-year Treasury rose to 4.26% from 4.24% late Friday. Shorter-term yields were relatively steady. The two-year yield was unchanged at 4.52%, where it was late Friday.

Other corners of the market that could have swung sharply on uncertainty about the election also were mostly quiet. The U.S. dollar’s value was relatively steady against its biggest rivals.

In the meantime, reports on corporate profits and the U.S. economy’s growth could continue to grab the market’s spotlight. Analysts are expecting companies in the S&P 500 to deliver the strongest profit growth for the latest quarter since the end of 2021, according to FactSet.

Truist Financial rose 3.2% after the bank reported net interest income, a key underlying measure of overall profit, that analysts called stronger than expected.

Verizon Communications tumbled 6.1% after reporting profit for the latest quarter that matched analysts’ expectations but revenue that fell just short.

Besides Alphabet and Tesla, dozens of other big U.S. companies will report their latest quarterly results this week, including Coca-Cola, Ford and American Airlines.

Airlines last week struggled with massive disruptions from a global technology outage, which appeared to have been largely resolved over the weekend but delays at airports continued Monday.

A faulty software update caused havoc worldwide and led to the grounding by almost all airlines of a number of flights. The vast majority of cancellations early Monday were Delta Air Lines flights. Delta’s stock lost 3.5%.

Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike said that the issue believed to be behind the outage was not a security incident or cyberattack and that it had deployed a fix. The company said the problem lay in a faulty update sent to computers running Microsoft Windows.

CrowdStrike’s stock fell 13.5% on Monday after taking an 11.1% hit Friday.

All told, the S&P 500 rose 59.41 points to 5,564.41. The Dow added 127.91 points to 40,415.44, and the Nasdaq gained 280.63 points to close at 18,007.57.

In stock markets abroad, indexes rose across much of Europe.

In Asia, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng rose 1.3%, but stocks fell 0.6% in Shanghai after China’s central bank unexpectedly lowered a benchmark interest rate for loans. The move came after the government recently reported that the world’s second-largest economy expanded at a slower-than-forecast pace in the second quarter.

Choe writes for the Associated Press