The New York stock market saw significant gains yesterday, the first trading day after President Joe Biden announced his withdrawal from the Democratic presidential race.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed up 0.32% at 40,415.44, gaining 127.91 points. The Standard & Poor’s (S&P) 500 index climbed 1.08% to reach 5,564.41, marking its largest increase since June 5th. Meanwhile, the Nasdaq composite rose by 1.58% to end the day at 18,007.57.
Particularly notable was Nvidia’s performance, with its stock price jumping 4.8%, recovering part of the 8% loss it suffered the previous week. Other major tech stocks also saw gains, with Meta Platforms rising by 2.23% and Alphabet increasing by 2.21%. In contrast, CrowdStrike, involved in a recent IT cloud blackout, saw its shares drop by 13.5%, making it the day’s worst performer in the S&P 500.
Tesla’s stock soared 5.15% ahead of its second-quarter earnings announcement, driven by CEO Elon Musk’s announcement of plans to start trial production of humanoid robots next year.
Further boosting the market, Nvidia’s shares approached a 5% increase after reports that the company is developing a flagship AI chip for the Chinese market that adheres to U.S. regulations. The stock closed at $123.54, pushing its market capitalization back over $3 trillion to $3.038 trillion.
Other semiconductor companies also saw substantial gains; ASML’s shares surged 5.13%, Qualcomm Incorporated rose 4.7%, and AMD, Broadcom, and Taiwan’s TSMC experienced increases of over 2%.
Mona Mahajan, senior investment strategist at Edward Jones, commented, “There was a sell-off in tech stocks last week due to the collapse of the cloud service. Today, the combination of improved corporate earnings and the Federal Reserve’s (Fed) interest rate cut movements gave hope to investors.”
