By Geoffrey Smith
Investing.com -- U.S. stock markets opened higher on Friday, on course for their highest weekly close in over a month, on sustained hopes that warring factions in Washington will still cobble together a stimulus package for the economy before the elections in November.
The time for any such package to have any effect on the economy, or even on consumer and business confidence, before the vote is fast running out. That is heaping pressure disproportionately on the administration, given polls showing a widening gap between President Donald Trump and his Democratic Party challenger Joe Biden. Trump had abruptly called off negotiations with House Democrats earlier in the week, only to backpedal over the next 48 hours.
The market shrugged off newswires reports citing Senate Leader Mitch McConnell as telling an event in Kentucky that a deal is "unlikely in the next three weeks."
By 9:40 AM ET (1340 GMT), the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 131 points, or 0.5%, at 28,547 points. The S&P 500 was up 0.6% and the Nasdaq Composite was up 0.8%.
The most prominent gainer was chipmaker Xilinx (NASDAQ:XLNX), which rose 17% after The Wall Street Journal reported that it's in advanced talks to be acquired by rival Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ:AMD) in a deal that would value it at over $30 billion. The high price tag knocked AMD stock down 2.4%.
Another chipmaker stock, NXP Semiconductors (NASDAQ:NXPI), rose 4.6% after it said demand had recovered faster than it had expected in a release of some preliminary third-quarter numbers. NXP's guidance for third-quarter revenue was some 13% above consensus forecasts.
Another riser was Gilead (NASDAQ:GILD) stock. The biotech company rose after final data from a study of its remdesivir Covid treatment showed the drug cut recovery time by five days compared with patients who received a placebo.
Data transfer company Fastly (NYSE:FSLY), which counts TikTok and Spotify (NYSE:SPOT) amongst its biggest customers, also renewed its seemingly unstoppable rally, rising another 6.9% to a fresh all-time high. It's now increased five-fold since April, making it one of the biggest winners of a pandemic that has massively accelerated long-term trends towards greater Cloud usage.
Among the losers, Exxon Mobil (NYSE:XOM) slipped another 0.7% despite speculation that it could soon become the target of activist investors. Exxon earlier this week lost its crown as the U.S.'s most valuable oil and gas producer to Chevron (NYSE:CVX) - the first time that's happened since it was carved out of Standard Oil.