Wall Street continues the rebound it began the day before on Friday, following a series of results deemed promising for the rest of the earnings season, which is set to intensify next week.

At the end of the morning, the Dow Jones was up 0.3% at 37,564.3 points, while the Nasdaq Composite was up around 0.5% at 15,126.7 points.564.3 points, while the Nasdaq Composite gained around 0.5% to 15,126.7 points.

Among the companies that published their accounts early this morning, insurer Travelers (+5.2%) was by far the Dow's biggest riser after posting record fourth-quarter profits.

Para-petroleum group SLB was up 1.9% after reporting better-than-expected quarterly results and raising its dividend, spurred on by a 'record' level of activity in the Middle East.

While the earnings season has so far got off to a slow start, these solid publications give cause for optimism, knowing that there will be more announcements next week, with accounts from leading groups such as Netflix, Tesla, J&J and Intel.

Semiconductor stocks remain on an upward trend, boosted by the promising prospects unveiled by Taiwanese foundry TSMC due to the boom in AI-related applications.

Texas Instruments shares gained 3.8%, followed by Qualcomm (+3.3%), while AMD gained 2.2%. The Philadelphia SOX semiconductor index gained 1.6% overall.

With the exception of communications (+1.1%), technology (+0.9%) and finance (+0.7%), all the major sectors of the S&P 500 were in negative territory on Friday.

But the CBOE volatility index, considered an indicator of the level of fear on Wall Street, continued its decline, giving up 3% to 13.7 points.

However, the markets' advance was held back by the announcement of a statistic on household morale that was well above expectations, fuelling concerns about the possibility of future rate cuts.

With inflation ebbing, the US consumer confidence index compiled by the University of Michigan jumped to 78.8 in January, the highest since July 2021.

Treasury bond yields are advancing on a broad front following this good indicator, which takes the wind out of the sails of the scenario of a rapid interest rate cut. Ten-year paper is now over 4.17%.

For the week as a whole, the Dow Jones is currently down 0.1%, while the Nasdaq is up over 1%.

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