Shares rallied on Wednesday as investors considered the end of an eventful month and first quarter of the year, which was marked by resilience amid a banking crisis and looming questions about the global economy.
At the closing bell, the S&P 500 (^GSPC) was up 1.1%, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI) was up 1% and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC) led gains with a 1.8% gain .
With the first quarter due to end on Friday, the Nasdaq is sitting on gains of over 13%, the S&P 500 is up more than 4.5% so far this year and the Dow is lagging, falling 1.3% in 2023 .
This relative performance is a reversal from last year, when the Nasdaq fell nearly 30%, the S&P 500 fell over 18%, and the Dow fell a more modest 9%.
Crude Oil prices were volatile on Wednesday, trading below $73 after changing hands north of $74 earlier in morning trade. The 10-year yield was around 3.55%.
Bitcoin (BTC-USD) was also significantly higher, surging more than 5% to trade north of $28,000.
So far this year, Bitcoin is up more than 70%.
The upward move in Wednesday’s major moving averages came amid a slightly slower corporate and economic news calendar, with last night’s gains in Micron Technology (MU) and Lululemon (LULU) serving as the key highlights during the trading session.
Micron shares rose more than 7% on Wednesday after the chip giant hinted last night that its struggling chip business could be turning a corner, with CEO Sanjay Mehrotra telling investors, “We’re about to make the transition to sequential revenue growth in our quarterly results.”
Micron on Tuesday reported revenue for the fiscal second quarter down about 10% sequentially and more than 50% from the same period last year.
Noting the potential positive impact that recent investor enthusiasm for AI advances could have on the industry, Mehrotra told investors, “Recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) provide an exciting prelude to the Transformation capabilities of large language models or LLMs, such as ChatGPT, which require significant amounts of memory and storage to operate. We are only in the very early stages of widespread adoption of these AI technologies and potential exponential growth in their commercial use cases.”
The story goes on
Lululemon shares rose more than 12% on Wednesday after top and bottom-line results beat estimates, with fourth-quarter revenue rising 30% while comparable store sales rose 27%.
On the economic data side, data on pending home sales from the National Association of Realtors showed that the number of homes on sale rose for the third straight month in February.
A Lululemon sign is seen at a mall in San Diego, California, the United States, November 23, 2022. Portal/Mike Blake
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