Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York City.
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U.S. equities rose on Monday as Wall Street began a new month of trading, with investors looking past the recent losses in silver and bitcoin.
The S&P 500 was up 0.7%, helped by rise in Oracle shares after the data center company announced it’s going to raise up to $50 billion to build additional capacity for cloud customers. The Dow Jones Industrial Average advanced 508 points, or 1%, while the Nasdaq Composite gained 0.8%.
Bitcoin dropped below $80,000 for the first time since April, a sign investors were taking more risk off the table following Friday’s sharp declines in gold and silver. Silver, which has more than doubled over the past 12 months, plunged around 30% on Friday. That marked the metal’s worst one-day performance since 1980. Gold also dropped around 10%.
The cryptocurrency, as well as the two metals, later came off their respective lows Monday, which helped trim losses in equities and ease risk-off sentiment. Bitcoin last traded above $78,000, while spot gold and spot silver were down 4% and 7%, respectively.
Wall Street also turned its attention to Nvidia as questions over the artificial intelligence loomed. The Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter, that Nvidia’s plans to pour $100 billion into OpenAI had stalled, with chipmaker execs expressing doubt about the deal. Nvidia shares were down almost 1%.
“It seems to us that the bigger trends, which are mostly positive, are still in place,” said Tim Holland, chief investment officer at Orion. “What matters right now is still earnings, the fiscal policy backdrop – which is still constructive even with the temporary shutdown – and seasonality.”
Big earnings, jobs week
More than 100 S&P 500 companies are due to report this week. That includes Amazon and Alphabet — shares of both names were higher Monday. The overall reporting season has been strong thus far, but there have been some high-profile post-earnings sell-offs, including Microsoft.
Disney kicked off this week with reporting earnings that beat analyst expectations. However, the stock fell 6% after the company warned of headwinds from international travelers attending domestic parks.
Nonetheless, Deutsche Bank strategists noted this weekend that earnings growth is on track to be the strongest in four years. So far, about one-third of S&P 500 companies have reported, and roughly 78% of them have beaten expectations, per FactSet.
“If you think about sort of what’s had folks worried about equity prices here at home, it would be valuations, especially up the cap spectrum,” Holland said. “Double-digit earnings growth … for the fifth consecutive quarter would go a long way to assuage those valuation concerns that we’ve all lived with for the last couple years.”