Most stocks climb higher on record set by Wall Street

Most stocks rose on Wall Street Monday to build on its all-time high reached last week.

The Standard & Poor’s 500 index added 10.62 points, or 0.2%, to 4,850.43. The Dow Jones industrial average topped 38,000 points after rising 138.01 points, or 0.4%, to 38,001.81. The Nasdaq composite gained 49.32 points, or 0.3%, to 15,360.29.

Macy’s climbed 3.6% after the retailer said it rejected a buyout offer from two investment companies, in part because it didn’t offer “compelling value.” SolarEdge Technologies rose 4% after it said it would cut 16% of its workforce, and NuStar Energy jumped 18.2% after Sunoco said it would buy the pipeline and storage company in a deal valued at $7.3 billion, including debt.

They helped offset a 24.2% drop for Archer Daniels Midland, which put its chief financial officer on leave. After getting a document request from U.S. regulators, it said it’s investigating some of its accounting practices. ADM also said it expects to report 2023 fullyear profit that’s below what analysts were forecasting.

This week will see a rush of companies reporting results for the last three months of 2023, with roughly 70 companies from the S&P 500 on the calendar. They include American Airlines, Intel and Tesla.

Analysts expect companies in the S&P 500 to report an overall drop in fourthquarter earnings, down nearly 2% from a year earlier, according to FactSet.

After the initial week of earnings reporting season, companies that have been topping analysts’ forecasts for profits and revenue have been getting smaller bumps to their stock prices than usual, according to strategists at Bank of America.

Companies that fall short of expectations, meanwhile, have seen their stock prices get punished more than usual. It all points to “a higher bar after a big rally,” Savita Subramanian and Ohsung Kwon wrote in a BofA Global Research report.

That big rally came mostly on hopes that a cooldown in inflation will allow the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates several times this year.

The expectation is still for the Fed to cut rates more this year than the three times it’s indicated.

On Thursday, the government will give its first estimate for how strongly the economy grew during the last three months of 2023.

Economists expect it to show that the economy is still growing, but at a slower pace than during the summer. That’s exactly what the Fed wants to see, because too strong of an economy would keep upward pressure on inflation.

Treasury yields have eased significantly since October on expectations for coming rate cuts. Yields fell further Monday.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury fell to 4.10% from 4.13% late Friday and from 5% in October.

The two-year Treasury yield, which tends to move more on expectations for action by the Fed, ticked up to 4.41% from 4.39%.