STORY: Wall Street’s main indexes bounced back Wednesday, with the Dow notching its third record closing high in four days.
The blue-chip index climbed eight-tenths of a percent, the S&P 500 added about half a percent and the Nasdaq gained nearly three-tenths of a percent.
Financial stocks led the way, with Morgan Stanley jumping 6.5% to a record close after it joined peers such as JPMorgan Chase in reporting strong profits following a sharp increase in investment banking revenue.
Mel Casey, senior portfolio manager at FBB Capital Partners, said it’s nice to see a sector other than Big Tech reap big gains.
“One thing to point out is we’ve started to get earnings from some of the large banks, and we started to see that maybe there’s more going on there than just interest rates, but actually some of the economic activity, the investment banking, the wealth management trading revenue, all those things are actually starting to look pretty good. And so people are giving that area a second look, which is which is good to see in terms of overall market breadth and healthiness.”
Shares of larger regional banks, traditionally less reliant on investment banking activities, were also higher.
First Horizon rose 4% and U.S. Bancorp gained more than 4.5% after reporting third-quarter results.
Meanwhile, several big-tech names lost ground, with Apple dipping about 1% after hitting a record high in the previous session. Alphabet, Meta Platforms and Microsoft also ended lower.
Bucking the trend was chip heavyweight Nvidia, up more than 3% after slumping the day before.
And airline stocks soared, with United gaining about 12.5% – its best one-day performance in six months – after forecasting better-than-expected fourth-quarter profit and announcing a $1.5-billion share buyback program.
The results were a tailwind for peers Delta and American Airlines, whose shares also saw substantial gains.
