NEW YORK (AP) 鈥� Wall Street rallied out of its holiday-season funk. The S&P 500 climbed 1.3% Friday, its best day in nearly two months and its first gain since Christmas. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.8%, and the Nasdaq composite gained 1.8%. Big Tech stocks led the way, and Nvidia and Tesla in particular helped pull the market higher. They offset drops for beer, wine and liquor companies after the U.S. Surgeon General warned of cancer risks related to alcohol. Treasury yields ticked higher in the bond market following a better-than-feared report on U.S. manufacturing.
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. AP鈥檚 earlier story follows below.
NEW YORK (AP) 鈥� Wall Street is rallying out of its holiday-season funk on Friday, and its best day in nearly two months is helping to trim U.S. stock indexes鈥� losses for the week.
The S&P 500 climbed 1.2% toward its first gain since Christmas. It's on track to break a , its longest since April, and cut its loss for the week to 0.5% thanks in large part to Big Tech stocks.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 313 points, or 0.7%, with an hour remaining in trading, and the Nasdaq composite was 1.7% higher.
Nvidia helped drive the market higher, despite criticism that prices for it and other tech companies have vaulted too high in the frenzy around artificial-intelligence technology. Nvidia rose 4.3% and was the strongest force pushing the S&P 500 upward. Super Micro Computer, which sells servers for AI and other uses, jumped 7.8%.
鈥淲hile the easy gains in AI may be behind us, we think this rally looks far from over,鈥� according to Solita Marcelli, chief investment officer, Americas, at UBS Global Wealth Management.
Another influential Big Tech stock, Tesla, rose 6.7% to bounce back from its 6.6% tumble the day before, when it disclosed it in the last three months of 2024 than analysts expected.
Rival Rivian jumped 22.3% after saying it delivered more than 14,000 vehicles during the last three months of 2024. That was more than analysts expected.
On the losing end of Wall Street was U.S. Steel, which fell 5.4% after proposed by Japan鈥檚 Nippon Steel to buy its Pittsburgh-based rival.
Beer, wine and liquor companies sank after U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy warned about the direct link between . He called for an update on the health warning label on alcoholic drinks, as well as for a reassessment of guidelines for alcohol consumption to account for cancer risk.
Molson Coors Beverage fell 3.4%. Brown-Forman, the distillery behind Jack Daniel's, lost 1.6%.
Wall Street鈥檚 pullback over the last week has dimmed its shine by only a bit following two stellar years for U.S. stock indexes. They鈥檝e vaulted to records after the U.S. economy managed to keep growing despite high interest rates that have helped bring high inflation nearly all the way down to the Federal Reserve鈥檚 2% target.
But even though the economy and job market look solid at the moment, the path ahead is not assured. Part of the reason the S&P 500 set more than 50 all-time highs last year was because of the expectation that the Fed would keep cutting interest rates through 2025, after it began easing them in September.
Traders are now for coming cuts to rates. as the Fed tries to wring the last percentage point of improvement from inflation to get it to its 2% goal. Worries are also rising that tariffs and other policies coming from could put further . All the while, critics say U.S. stock prices simply look too expensive after rising so much faster than corporate profits.
The threat of Trump鈥檚 tariffs has also hurt stock markets overseas. For China, it鈥檚 compounded worries about the world鈥檚 second-largest economy, which is already contending with a struggling property market and other challenges.
Stocks dropped 1.6% in Shanghai to bring their loss for the week to 5.6%, though they climbed 0.7% in Hong Kong to trim their weekly loss below 2%. European stock indexes also fell.
Kospi jumped 1.8% after the acting president and finance minister, Choi Sang-mok, promised to do more to stabilize the economy. The country is in the midst of a political crisis that has seen two heads of state impeached in under a month.
In the bond market, Treasury yields ticked higher after a report said U.S. manufacturing is not as weak as economists expected.
The report from the Institute for Supply Management showed another month of contraction for manufacturers, the 25th in the last 26, but it wasn't as severe as feared. Manufacturing has been one of the areas of the economy hit hardest by the high interest rates of recent years.
The 10-year Treasury yield rose to 4.59% from 4.56% late Thursday. The two-year Treasury yield, which more closely tracks expectations for Fed action, rose to 4.28% from 4.25% late Thursday.
Stan Choe, The Associated Press
