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Stocks were higher near midday on Wednesday as investors eye the end of an eventful month and first quarter of the year marked by resiliency in the face of a bank crisis and looming questions about the global economy.
Near 12:20 p.m. ET on Wednesday, the S&P 500 (^GSPC) was up 1.1%, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI) was higher by 0.7%, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC) led gains, rising 1.4%.
With the first quarter set to wrap up Friday, the Nasdaq is sitting on gains near 12%, the S&P 500 is up more than 3% so far this year, and the Dow is lagging, falling 2.2% in 2023.
This relative performance is a reversal from what was seen last year when the Nasdaq fell nearly 30%, the S&P 500 lost over 18%, and the Dow fell a more modest 9%.
The price of crude oil was volatile on Wednesday, trading near $73 after having changed hands north of $74 earlier in morning trade. The 10-year yield was trading near 3.55%.
Bitcoin (BTC-USD) was also notably higher, rising more than 5% to trade north of $28,000.
So far this year, bitcoin has gained more than 70%.
Wednesday’s move higher comes amid a somewhat slower calendar for corporate and economic news, with earnings last night from Micron Technology (MU) and Lululemon (LULU) serving as the key highlights early in the trading session.
Micron shares were up more than 6% early Wednesday after the chip giant last night suggested the battered chip business could be turning a corner, with CEO Sanjay Mehrotra telling investors “we are close to a transition to sequential revenue growth in our quarterly results.”
Micron reported revenues for its fiscal second quarter on Tuesday that were down about 10% from the prior quarter and more than 50% lower than the same period last year.
Mehrotra also called out the potential positive impacts that recent investor enthusiasm around AI advances could have on the industry, telling investors: “Recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) provide an exciting prelude to the transformational capabilities of large language models, or LLMs, such as ChatGPT, which require significant amounts of memory and storage to operate. We are only in the very early stages of the widespread deployment of these AI technologies and potential exponential growth in their commercial use cases.”
Lululemon shares, meanwhile, were up as much as 12% on Wednesday after reporting top and bottom line results that beat estimates, with revenue rising 30% in the fourth quarter as comparable store sales rose 27%.
On the economic data side, data on pending home sales from the National Association of Realtors showed homes under contract rose for the third-straight month in February.
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