Earnings push Wall Street ahead to strong July

US stocks closed with little change on Monday, ending a strong July on upbeat company earnings and hopes of a soft landing for a resilient US economy. All three major stock indexes ended with gains for the month, ahead of a busy week of earnings reports from companies including Amazon.com and Apple, plus US economic data including the key jobs reports in the United States.

Regarding Apple, China continues to pose a threat to Apple, but Rao anticipates that geopolitical relations will improve before there are significant disruptions. Although the AWS growth engine of Amazon is faltering, this quarter’s earnings have not slowed down.

The S&P 500 posted 27 new 52-week highs and one new low; the Nasdaq Composite recorded 95 new highs and 57 new lows.

Tech-heavy Nasdaq led Wall Street higher last week as MEGACAP growth companies such as Alphabet, Meta Platforms, Intel, and Lam Research posted strong quarterly earnings. Citigroup raised its 2023-end and mid-2024 S&P 500 targets to 4,600 and 5,000, respectively, to reflect a higher possibility of a soft landing.

The benchmark index is just under 5% away from its all-time intraday high hit on Jan. 4, 2022 while on course to gain for a fifth straight month. Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee said the central bank was “walking the line pretty well” on bringing inflation down without causing a recession and will watch the data to judge if more monetary tightening may be appropriate in September.

Eight of the top 11 S&P 500 sectors posted gains, led by a 2% rise in energy stocks. The main thing is the strengthened oil, which is above $80 a barrel, back all the way from the decline that was precipitated by the banking crisis.

Financial services provider SoFi Technologies added 19.9% after reporting better-than-expected quarterly revenue. ON Semiconductor jumped 2.5% after the chipmaker forecast third-quarter revenue above market estimates. Johnson & Johnson shed 4.0% after a US judge shot down the drugmaker’s second attempt to resolve tens of thousands of lawsuits over its talc products.

Adobe advanced 3.3%, outperforming tech peers, after Morgan Stanley raised its rating to “overweight” on the photoshop maker. Volume on US exchanges was 11.09 billion shares, compared with the 10.49 billion average for the full session over the last 20 trading days.