U.S. stocks rose Wednesday as Wall Street turned the page to another month following a volatile May.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average added about 230 points, or 0.7%. The S&P 500 rose 0.8%. The Nasdaq Composite ticked up 1.3%.
Boosting the major averages,Salesforcesurged more than 12% after the company’sfirst-quarter results topped expectations.
Other software names also rallied, with ServiceNow adding more than 4% and Adobe gaining about 4%.
Stocks are coming off adown dayas investors weathered a choppy trading session to close out the month.
For the month of May, the Dow and S&P 500 finished little changed, after last week’s strong rally chipped away at long losing streaks for the indexes. The Nasdaq Composite underperformed, shedding more than 2%.
However, the ride for stock investors was far more turbulent than the month-end results suggest. The S&P 500 briefly dipped into bear market territory last month, trading more than 20% below a record at one point. The Nasdaq, meanwhile, is deep in a bear market — down 25.5% from an all-time high.
Traders pored over a raft of mixed quarterly results that included some big misses frombellwether names like Walmart.
Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve at the start of May hiked rates by 50 basis points to quell an inflationary surge not seen in decades.
The first day of June marks the start of the Fed’s plan to reduce its balance sheet, which ballooned to nearly $9 trillion during the Covid pandemic.
With the first-quarter earnings season nearly complete and the Fed having strongly signaled its rate hike intentions for its next two meetings, stocks could struggle for direction over the summer.
“It’s best to wait and see how the next quarter shakes out. When we get into late July, we’ll have a better picture. Until then, I think we’re going to see very much a choppy market with a bias towards falling further into a bear market,” said Max Gokhman, chief investment officer at AlphaTrAI.
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