Tech shares rise in mixed day for stocks

NEW YORK — Tech stocks were the standouts in an otherwise sluggish day of trading Monday, as investors gear up for the arrival of the heart of earnings reporting season.

Apple, Intel and several chipmakers jumped more than 2 percent, and technology stocks in the S&P 500 climbed 1.2 percent. But the other 10 sectors that make up the index were evenly split between gainers and losers, and none moved by more than 0.5 percent.

All the mixed trading left the S&P 500 up 8.42 points, or 0.3 percent, at 2,985.03. The index is back within 1 percent of its record, which was set a week earlier.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average edged up 17.70, or 0.1 percent, to 21,171.90, and the Nasdaq composite rose 57.65, or 0.7 percent, to 8,204.14.

More action may arrive in the next two weeks, when a wave of earnings reports is on the schedule. Roughly three-fifths of S&P 500 companies are set to update investors on how much profit they made from April through June, and expectations are generally low.

A slowing global economy and rising costs are weighing on companies, and many investors are more interested in what CEOs say about how President Donald Trump’s trade war will affect their future profits than in their results for the spring.

The past couple of earnings reporting seasons have been so volatile for stocks that Craig Hodges, portfolio manager at Hodges Funds, said he’s recently raised how much cash he’s holding in anticipation of bargain-hunting opportunities.

“We’re sitting on cash right now, knowing that in the next few weeks, there will be a lot of stocks that we like that get hit by 10, 15 or maybe even 20 percent if they have a miss,” he said.

So far this reporting season, which is still in its early going, stocks have dropped a bit more than usual when a company falls short of Wall Street’s earnings expectations. Among the 16 percent of big S&P 500 companies that have already reported their second quarter results, the average decline has been 2.7 percent after an earnings miss, slightly more than the 2.6 percent average over the past five years, according to FactSet.

On the winning end Monday was Halliburton, which reported a bigger profit than Wall Street expected and surged 9.1 percent.

The other big looming event for markets is the Federal Reserve’s meeting at the end of the month, when investors expect the central bank to cut interest rates for the first time in more than a decade. Some investors have recently scaled back their expectations for how much the Fed may cut rates, down to a quarter of a percentage point from a half point. The price of crude oil also continued to climb amid heightened tensions in the Persian Gulf area. Iran on Monday announced the arrest of 17 people it accused of spying for the United States, something Trump called “totally false.”

Benchmark crude oil rose 46 cents to settle at $56.09 a barrel. Brent crude oil, the international standard, rose $79 cents to close at $63.26.