Tech stocks lead a rally; S&P 500 turns positive for year

The company also promised, as early as the next quarter, financial results to be more transparent than the usual “advertising” and “other” brackets.

Microsoft, Amazon and Google’s parent company Alphabet are all sharply higher in the first few minutes of trading Friday.

But another disappointing USA job report next month after October’s weaker-than-expected growth “might be cause for further pause”, he said.

“We are making strong progress across each of our three ambitions by delivering innovation people love”, said Satya Nadella.

The company forecasted earnings per share for the year in the range of $7.73 to $7.78 and plans to reduce 1,500 jobs under global restructuring program. If those gains hold at the open of trading, the S&P 500 will show a positive gain for 2015. 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. The fast-food giant’s stock price rose 8% to a new high on Thursday following strong Q3 earnings and sales.

In Asia, Japanese stocks rose after Draghi’s comments.

Beyond that, investors pored over the latest slate of company earnings, which helped put them in a buying mood.

Traders bid up eBay, which reported earnings late Wednesday that came in well ahead of what analysts were expecting. The Powershares QQQ Trust exchange-traded fund climbed 2.8 percent to $112.74.

Amazon reported sales on Thursday that beat analysts’ estimates. McDonald’s shares added $8.33 to $110.87.

Texas Instruments’ earnings also beat projections. The stock slid $14.55 to $31.64. Both Amazon and Microsoft believe that their core offerings in the future will be cloud based, which can easily evidenced by the rapid booms in revenue reported by each company in their quarterly reports. On the Nasdaq, 1,633 issues rose and 664 fell.

Amazon also surprised analysts after reporting a profit on a 23% sales gain. That’s better than the historic average of 66 percent, according to S&P Capital IQ. Utilities stocks fell the most, down 1.5 percent. The sector, which was among the biggest risers in the index for much of the year, is down 0.9 percent. Now it’s less than 4 percent away. The JPX-Nikkei Index 400 rose 2.1 percent to close at 13,878.26.

Like the stock market, bonds have seesawed throughout the year and are nearly unchanged from the end of 2014. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng fell 0.6 percent. Brent Crude fell 36 cents to $47.72 a barrel in London.

McDonald ” s Corporation (MCD) jumped 7.4% or $7.56 to $110.10 after the quick service restaurants operator reported revenues in the third-quarter ending in September declined 5% from a year ago to $6.62 billion.

If Windows 10 ever turns around the moribund PC industry, watch out.

METALS: Precious and industrial metals futures closed lower.

AWS brought in $2.09bn for the firm in Q315, compared with $1.17bn for this time past year, with $5.47bn in the nine months from January 2015.

The better-than-expected results are a bright spot for the market following a period of intense volatility over worries about China and the timing of a USA interest rate hike. The benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury yield climbed to 2.07% from around 2.05% just before the announcement.