By Yasin Ebrahim
Investing.com – Wall Street rose on Monday, led by a jump in financials as the economic reopening stoked hopes that a widely-expected recession may be short-lived, prompting investors to up in their bullish bets on stocks.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 1.55%, or 367 points, the S&P 500 gained 1.53%, while the Nasdaq Composite added 1.16%.
With some states lifting lockdown restriction over the weekend, investors ditched safe havens in hope that the reopening will boost activity, triggering a jump in U.S. bond yields, which underpinned a rally in financials, mostly banking stocks.
JPMorgan Chase (NYSE:JPM), Bank of America (NYSE:BAC) and Citigroup (NYSE:C) were up more than 4%.
Higher interest rates are seen as a boon for banks, boosting net interest margin – the difference between the interest income generated by banks and the amount of interest paid out to their lenders.
Tech lagged the broader move higher, weighed by Apple after the tech giant said it was delaying a ramp-up of production by about a month, amid the Covid-19 hit to consumer demand and supply chain operations.
Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) was roughly flat.
The labored move higher in broader tech comes as several FAANG names are set to release quarterly earnings later this week, with Google-parent Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) set to report tomorrow, Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) reporting on Wednesday, Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) and Apple on Thursday.
Twitter (NYSE:TWTR), meanwhile, jumped 4% ahead of its quarterly numbers due Thursday, after Mizuho upgraded the social media company to neutral from underperform on expectations that most of the coronavirus impact was priced in.
General Motors (NYSE:GM) was up 1.5% even as the automaker suspended its dividend and share repurchase program in a bid to conserve cash.
Energy shrugged off a steep decline in oil prices on rising fears over storage capacity at a time when the coronavirus pandemic continued to hurt demand.
Also helping investor sentiment ahead of the open, the Bank of Japan launched further stimulus, tripling its holdings of corporate debt to 20 trillion yen, and pledging to carry out unlimited bond purchases to keep borrowing costs low and prop up its economy.
The move comes just a day ahead of the Federal Reserve's two-day meeting.