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NEW YORK (AP) — Wall Street closed out a winning April with gains Friday after more companies said their profits at the start of the year weren’t as bad as expected.
The S&P 500 rose 34.13, or 0.8%, to 4,169.48. Despite some sharp swings this week, it still clinched a second straight winning month. The Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed 272.00, or 0.8%, to 34,098.16, and the Nasdaq composite gained 84.35, or 0.7%, to 12,226.58.
Exxon Mobil did some of the market's heavier lifting after it rose 1.3%. It reported stronger profit and revenue for the latest quarter than forecast.
Intel gained 4% after reporting a milder loss than expected and stronger revenue for the latest quarter. Mondelez International, the food giant behind Oreo and Ritz, rose 3.9% after topping Wall Street’s estimates. It also raised its forecast for revenue and earnings over the full year.
They helped to offset a 4% drop for Amazon, which weighed heavily on the market despite reporting stronger profit and revenue for the latest quarter than expected. Analysts pointed to a slowdown in revenue growth at its AWS cloud computing business.
Snap tumbled 17% after its revenue for the latest quarter fell short of forecasts. Pinterest also fell sharply, down 15.7%, despite reporting stronger results than expected. Analysts pointed to its growth forecast for the current quarter, which looked more tepid than some expected.
Wall Street has focused heavily on what CEOs are saying about their upcoming trends given how much uncertainty is ahead about where the economy and interest rates are heading. The economy is slowing under the weight of much higher interest rates meant to get high inflation under control.
The majority of companies so far this reporting season have beaten expectations, highlighted by Big Tech behemoths this past week like Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta Platforms. They have an outsized effect on market indexes because of their massive size.
But the bar broadly was set considerably low for the first three months of the year. Wall Street is worried that continued weakness could lead to a third straight drop in earnings for S&P 500 companies in the second quarter of the year.
Recent economic reports have kept expectations in place on Wall Street for the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates again at its next meeting next week. Traders are also betting on a small possibility the Fed may raise rates again in June.
A report on Friday said the inflation measure that the Fed prefers to use came in close to expectations for March, but it remains well above the target.