NEW YORK — A widespread rally swept Wall Street Friday, lifting far-reaching corners, to close a tumultuous week where stocks that had been left behind for much of this year’s record-setting run wrested the spotlight back from the market’s biggest stars.
The S&P 500 jumped 1.1% for its best day in seven weeks after 3M and several other big companies delivered better profits for the spring than analysts expected. The Dow Jones Industrial Average soared 654 points, or 1.6%, while the Nasdaq composite climbed 1%.
The market’s widespread gains included rallies for both Big Tech behemoths and smaller stocks. That’s a departure from recent trading, where a divide deepened between the handful of elite stocks that dominated the market for much of this year and almost everyone else.
Nvidia rose 0.7% to trim its loss for the week to 4.1%. Most of the other members of the small group of stocks known as the “Magnificent Seven” also climbed to claw back some of their losses from earlier in the week.
They were under pressure after the latest profit reports from Tesla and Alphabet raised worries that investors had gotten carried away in their frenzy around artificial-intelligence technology and taken Magnificent Seven prices too high. Because those seven stocks are so massive in size, they were the main reason the S&P 500 set dozens of all-time highs this year, and they masked weakness elsewhere in the market.
As those Big Tech stocks atop the market’s leaderboard tumbled, formerly downtrodden areas of the market turned higher, and that momentum kept rolling Friday. The Russell 2000 index of smaller stocks climbed 1.7% to bring its gain for the month so far to 10.4%. That towers over the roughly flat performance for the big stocks in the S&P 500.
Industrial companies and other businesses whose profits are closely tied to the strength of the economy also rallied. They had lagged earlier this year under the weight of high interest rates meant to get inflation under control.
Norfolk Southern rose 10.9% to erase what had been a loss for the year so far after the rail company reported better profit for the latest quarter than analysts expected. It got a boost from insurance payments related to last year’s disastrous East Palestine derailment. The company also made progress in reducing its expenses and improving efficiency.
3M leaped 23% after reporting stronger profit and revenue for the latest quarter than analysts expected. The company behind the…
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