By Geoffrey Smith
Investing.com -- U.S. stock markets opened May brightly, with plenty of willingness to buy the dip caused by end-of-month profit-taking on Friday.
The market was underpinned by expectations that the coming week will bring further evidence of a robust economic recovery, in the shape of the ADP (NASDAQ:ADP) and official labor market reports on Wednesday and Friday respectively. Analysts expect the U.S. economy to have added nearly 1 million jobs in April as lockdown restrictions were lifted across the country and infection rates fell against a backdrop of wider vaccine-induced immunity. The 988,000 job gain would be even more than the 916,000 jobs added in March.
Concerns about a possible tightening of monetary policy remain muted, meanwhile, despite comments by Dallas Federal Reserve President Robert Kaplan last Friday that it is already appropriate to talk about reducing the pace of bond purchases from the current rate of $120 billion a month.
Kaplan is a noted hawk among the central bank's top management and his voice seems set to remain a minority one for some time yet.
As of 9:40 AM ET (1340 GMT), the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 265 points, or 0.8%, at 34,139 points. The S&P 500 was up 0.5% and the Nasdaq Composite was up 0.2%.
Amon the early movers was Verizon Communications (NYSE:VZ) stock, which rose 0.7% after the company said it has agreed to sell various media assets including Yahoo (NASDAQ:AABA) and AOL to Apollo, drawing a line under an unsuccessful foray into advertising technology.
Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE:BRKa) stock rose 1.7% after the company reported a swing to profit of over $11 billion in the first quarter at its annual shareholder meeting at the weekend, which was also notable for fresh scorn heaped by Berkshire’s Charlie Munger upon the cryptocurrency trading boom. Warren Buffett's investment firm has seemed increasingly out of touch with contemporary market trends in recent years, refusing to embrace the hype of crypto and numerous other innovations in markets, such as SPACs (another target for Munger's wrath).
SPACs were in the headlines again on Monday as Swiss biotech company Roivant Sciences agreed to be taken public by the Montes Archimedes Acquisition Corp (NASDAQ:MAAC) set up by former KKR dealmaker Jim Momtazee, in a deal that values Roivant at $7.3 billion. Elsewhere, Ocugen (NASDAQ:OCGN) stock rose 16% after saying its COVAXIN technology was potentially effective against various mutations of the Covid-19 virus, while more established vaccine providers Moderna (NASDAQ:MRNA) and BioNTech (NASDAQ:BNTX) rose 3.4% and 5.8% respectively.
Estee Lauder (NYSE:EL) stock, meanwhile, fell 5.3% after a disappointing quarterly update. Extended working-from-home and restrictions on nightlife and social gatherings all continued to weigh on the cosmetics company.