The best week for US stocks since November closed out with more gains thanks to Alphabet and Microsoft on Friday, per the AP:
- The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 153.86 points, or 0.4%, to 38,239.66, closing its first winning week in the past four.
- The S&P 500 rose 51.54 points, or 1%, to 5,099.96.
- The Nasdaq rose 316.14 points, or 2%, to 15,927.90.
Alphabet leaped 10.2% after breezing past analysts' expectations for profit last quarter. The parent company of Google also said it will start paying a dividend to investors and authorized a program to buy back up to $70 billion of its stock, a signal of how much cash it's generating. Microsoft, meanwhile, climbed 1.8% after reporting stronger profit and revenue than expected. It cited strong growth in its cloud-computing business as it pushes artificial intelligence technology to its customers. They helped offset a 9.2% drop for Intel. It reported stronger profit for the latest quarter than expected, but its revenue fell short of analysts' estimates. So did its forecast for profit in the current quarter.
Stocks have broadly been under pressure this month after hopes withered for multiple cuts to interest rates this year by the Federal Reserve. A series of reports showing inflation remaining worse than forecast has traders expecting maybe one cut this year, down from forecasts for six or more at the start of the year. Yet another report on Friday showed inflation remaining high. This time it was the measure of prices for March that the Federal Reserve prefers to use, but it wasn't much worse than forecasts. Financial markets took it much more in stride than a report from the day before that suggested the same measure of inflation rose quickly from January through March.
(More
stock market stories.)
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
