The gains put the Standard & Poor’s 500 index back into positive territory for the year following a market swoon in August and September. The stock gave the biggest boost to all three indexes.
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The rally followed a batch of encouraging earnings from McDonald’s, eBay and other companies. Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft and American Airlines reported better-than-expected earnings.
“I think the combination of Amazon, Microsoft and Google, as the technology leaders of the world, each showing accelerating growth in their Internet-related businesses, represents a very powerful statement”, said Frederick Moran, an analyst at brokerage Burke and Quick Partners in Uniondale, New York. “There’s a lot of hand-wringing over third-quarter earnings and on balance they’ve been pretty good”.
ETFs tracking the S&P 500, Nasdaq and Dow regained their 200-day moving averages. That raised expectations that the European Central Bank might extend its $1.2 trillion bond purchase program. It was the sixth interest-rate cut in a year.
“The market was in a tight trading range leading up to today’s move to the upside, waiting for a catalyst in essence to push the market in one direction or the other”, said Quincy Krosby, a market strategist at Prudential Financial. Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 climbed 1.7 percent to 5,351.60.
Shares of large banks pushed higher, including JPMorgan Chase (+1.1 percent), Citigroup (+2.2 percent) and Bank of America (+2.2 percent). The company has grown quickly, but has often swung seemingly randomly from profit to loss, depending on how much the company wanted to spend in a given quarter on long-term initiatives, like building new warehouses for the shipping of product or developing a new device to distribute digital content.
A few companies turned in disappointing results, which sent their share prices tumbling. American also announced it would buy back $2 billion of its stock. The stock lost $4.01 to $72.50.
The accommodative stance from the European Central Bank helped market to ease tensions and the market indexes shot up in Tokyo trading. The worst performer was Stericycle (O:SRCL), which plummeted 29.22 or 19.61% to 119.82 after the medical waste disposal company posted weak revenue and earnings growth over its third quarter.
CHARGING AHEAD: Shares in Capital One Financial rose 8.1 percent.
And Windows Phone also continued to show weakness after Phone revenue declined 54 percent, “reflecting our updated strategy”. Utilities stocks fell the most, down 1.7 percent.
Among the hardest-hit health care stocks Thursday were Tenet Healthcare and Universal Health Services.
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Pandora Media (NYSE:P) plummeted more than 35% to $12.35 per share. Britain’s FTSE 100 climbed 1.2 percent to 6,449.53. Now it’s less than 4 per cent away, with four stocks that already account for one-10th of the recovery in the last two months surging. The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite index was up about 1.8 percent. Elsewhere in Asia stock markets closed mostly lower. Japan’s Nikkei 225 jumped 2.1 percent, while South Korea’s Kospi gained 0.9 percent. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng fell 0.6 percent. Brent Crude fell 43 cents to $47.65 a barrel in London. In fact, Azure revenue rose 8 percent to $5.9 billion and perhaps more importantly, it’s expected to reach roughly $6.3 billion during the fourth quarter.
