Rally resumes; gold hits a record

Wall Street’s rally got back on track Monday, while gold rushed to a record at the start of a week packed with potentially marketmoving events.

The S&P 500 rose 0.7% to more than recover all its losses from last week, as Apple and other tech giants returned to their winning ways. Nervousness was still hanging over markets, though, and gold briefly topped $1,940 per ounce for the first time.

The S&P 500 climbed 23.78 points to 3,239.41. The Dow Jones industrial average rose 114.88 points, or 0.4%, to 26,584.77, and the Nasdaq composite gained 173.09 points, or 1.7%, to 10,536.27.

Investors this week will be closely watching a twoday meeting of the Federal Reserve on interest rates that begins Tuesday.

The Fed helped end the market’s sell-off in March, catapulting it into a tremendous rally, after promising to keep interest rates at record lows and to hoover up a wide range of bonds to support the economy.

Investors are waiting to hear what the Fed says this week about the economy’s prospects and what it plans to do on interest rates.

This week is also a busy one for corporate earnings, with more than a third of the companies in the S&P 500 scheduled to report how they fared from April through June.

So far, profit reports have been better than Wall Street forecast, though still far weaker than a year earlier because of the recession. Companies that have reported results topping expectations, though, have been getting a smaller bump than usual versus the rest of the market the following day, analysts wrote in a BofA Global Research report.

Several of the market’s most influential companies are scheduled to report this week, including Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google’s parent company. Those four account for 16% of the S&P 500’s total value, which gives their movements outsize influence on the index.

All the uncertainty about the economy, the pandemic and how long interest rates will remain near zero have helped drive the price of gold higher, making it the bestperforming investment of 2020.

More recently, a weaker U.S. dollar and worries about rising tensions between the United States and China have given gold an extra boost.

Gold for delivery in August added $33.50 to settle at $1,931.00 per ounce Monday, after earlier climbing as high as $1,941.90. That’s an intraday record for the most actively traded contract, and it follows up on Friday’s record high for a settlement price.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury note ticked up to 0.60% from 0.58% late Friday.

Benchmark U.S. crude rose 31 cents to settle at $41.60 per barrel. Brent crude, the international standard, rose 7 cents to $43.41 a barrel.