Wall Street closes broadly higher on deal news, vaccine hopes
The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 327.69 points, or 1.18%, to 27,993.33, the S&P 500 gained 42.57 points, or 1.27%, to 3,383.54 and the Nasdaq Composite added 203.11 points, or1.87%, to 11,056.65.
U.S. stocks ended sharply higher on Monday as signs of progress in developing a COVID-19 vaccine and a spurt of multibillion-dollar deals lifted investor optimism.
Gains were broad-based, with all of the S&P 500 sectors ending in positive territory and real estate and technology leading gains.
Drugmaker AstraZeneca resumed its British clinical trials of its COVID-19 vaccine, one of the most advanced in development.
Also, Pfizer Inc rose 2.6% after the drugmaker and German biotech firm BioNTech SE proposed to expand their Phase 3 pivotal COVID-19 vaccine trial to about 44,000 participants.
Nvidia Corp jumped 5.8% and was among the biggest boosts for the S&P 500 and Nasdaq following plans to buy UK-based chip designer Arm from Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp for as much as $40 billion, in a deal set to reshape the global semiconductor landscape. The Philadelphia SE chip index rose 2.1%.
Oracle gained 4.3% as the cloud services company said it would team up with China’s ByteDance to keep TikTok operating in the United States, beating Microsoft Corp in a deal structured as a partnership rather than an outright sale.
Reference: Reuters
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