Tech Surge Pushes Stocks Back Into The Black

Futures on the Nasdaq 100 Index have climbed 2.8 percent since 4 p.m. Thursday in New York, while contracts on the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index are up 1.2 percent.

Technology stocks on the S&P 500 climbed 4.6% for the week. Energy and utilities were the only laggards, while technology and heath-care stocks surged.

For the week, the Dow rose 2.5 percent, the S&P 500 gained 2.1 percent and the Nasdaq jumped 3 percent. The division posted a 78% sales gain to hit $2.2 billion and is now running at a $7 billion annual rate. This gave Alphabet a market cap of about $522.5 billion, cementing its position as the second-most valuable stock after Apple Inc, which is worth about $660 billion.

Investors bet on further easing from the European Central Bank and the cut in interest rates in China, as well as its decision to cut the reserve requirement ratio for most big banks.

Bond prices fell. The yield on the 10-year US Treasury rose to 2.08 per cent from 2.02 per cent Thursday, while the 30-year advanced to 2.9 per cent from 2.86 per cent. Bond prices and yields move inversely.

Thursday’s relief rally for Wall Street retraced about half the “panic attack” since China devalued the yuan, said Ed Yardeni, chief investment strategist at Yardeni Research, in a note. Investor attention now turns to the world’s other big central banks, the Fed and the Bank of Japan, which are holding policy meetings next week at which officials will undoubtedly factor the ECB’s intentions into their own outlooks. Economists say the survey indicates economic growth continued at a modest pace in the fourth quarter, but perhaps not enough to keep the European Central Bank from considering more stimulus.

Alphabet announced its first-ever share buyback.

Amazon Web Services’s cloud-computing business has grown 78 percent annually, while Microsoft’s competing Azure service grew more than 100 percent year-on-year, generating almost US$5.9 billion in revenue.

Read: Are tech rebels Amazon and Alphabet finally growing up? Microsoft’s stock soared 10% to $52.87, giving the company a market valuation of $422 billion.

Alphabet said the number of paid clicks, which require advertisers to pay only if a user clicks on the ad, rose 23 percent, compared with 18 percent in the previous quarter.

Procter & Gamble Co.(PG) will report results later Friday.

The euro also remained on a weaker footing against the USA currency.

Shares of large banks pushed higher, including JPMorgan Chase (+1.1 percent), Citigroup (+2.2 percent) and Bank of America (+2.2 percent).