By Yasin Ebrahim
Investing.com --The S&P 500 jumped Thursday, as a slip in Treasury yields helped spark a wave of buying in growth sectors of the market including tech following the Federal Reserve-induced selloff a day earlier.
The S&P 500 rose 0.6%, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.5% or 149 points, and the Nasdaq gained 1.3%.
Treasury yields fell again on bets that the Fed is likely to pause, and eventually pivot sooner rather than later as tighter lending conditions amid stresses in the banking system will help cool inflation.
The Fed hiked rates yesterday, forecast one more hike this year, and ruled out the possibility of cuts, but markets aren’t convinced. The odds of a pause at the next meeting jumped to 55% from 31.4% the prior week, according to Investing.com’s Fed Rate Monitor Tool.
Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META) was up 3%, while Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) and Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) gained more than 2%.
Banking stocks pared some of their losses from a day earlier, led by regional banks as Truist Financial Corp (NYSE:TFC), Huntington Bancshares Incorporated (NASDAQ:HBAN), and U.S. Bancorp (NYSE:USB) rallied, but First Republic Bank (NYSE:FRC) continued to wobble.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Wednesday ruled out providing “blanket insurance” for bank deposits above $250,000 in the near term, keeping worries about smaller regional banks front and center.
Social media stocks were also in rally mode on hopes of a potential ban of rival TikTok. TikTok chief executive Shou Zi Chew is on Capitol Hill to deliver testimony before Congress as lawmakers mull whether to ban the app amid concerns about the app's data privacy, and possible connection to the Chinese Communist Party.
“If TikTok and ByteDance decided to fight this and potentially get banned in the US, the clear beneficiaries of this would be Snapchat and Meta/Facebook,” Wedbush said in a note.
The slip in rates didn’t provide relief for cryptocurrencies as sentiment was soured by reports that Coinbase (NASDAQ:COIN) will be sued by the U.S. government for allegedly listing unregistered securities.
In other news, Block (NYSE:SQ) fell more than 15% after shorter-seller Heidenburg accused the digital payment company of facilitating fraud and misleading investors.
On the economic front, weekly jobless claims continued to show strength in the labor market, with economists flagging the ongoing lack of labor supply.
“[T]he bottom line is that labor supply is not increasing in any meaningful way, and there is no evidence that this will change any time soon,” Jefferies said in a note.