Stocks shake off last week’s losses

NEW YORK — U.S. stocks climbed Monday to claw back a chunk of their losses from last week, which was the worst for the S&P 500 in more than a year.

The S&P 500 rose 0.9% to recover more than a quarter of last week’s rout. The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 253 points, or 0.7%, and the Nasdaq composite jumped 1.1%.

Most stocks across Wall Street rose. In the S&P 500, technology stocks led the way to bounce back from their worst week since the pandemic crash of 2020.

Nvidia leaped 4.4%, and Alphabet climbed 1.4% as Treasury yields stabilized in the bond market. Last week, a jump in yields cranked up the pressure on stocks, particularly those seen as the most expensive and making their investors wait the longest for big growth.

Bank stocks were also strong. Truist Financial rallied 3.4% after its profit for the start of the year topped analysts’ expectations.

Those helped offset a 3.4% drop for Tesla, which over the weekend announced more price cuts. Tesla, which has seen its stock drop more than 40% this year, will report firstquarter results Tuesday.

It’s a big week for earnings reports generally, with roughly 30% of the companies in the S&P 500 scheduled to say how much they made during the first three months of the year. That includes those known as the “Magnificent Seven.” These companies — Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Tesla — were responsible for the majority of the S&P 500’s big gain last year, raising the bar of expectations for them to justify their stock prices.

The difference in growth between the Magnificent Seven and the rest of the S&P 500 should close by the end of the year, strategists Ohsung Kwon and Savita Subramanian said in a BofA Global Research Report.

Verizon Communications helped kick off this week’s reports by disclosing a drop in profit that wasn’t as bad as analysts expected. Its stock swung from an early gain to a loss of 4.7% after it reported weakerthan-expected revenue for the first quarter and kept its forecast for full-year profit the same.

All told, the S&P 500 rose 43.4 points to 5,010.60. The Dow gained 253.6 to 38,239.98, and the Nasdaq jumped 169.3 to 15,451.31.

Even more pressure than usual is on companies to deliver fatter profits and revenue. That’s because the other big factor that sets stock prices, interest rates, looks unlikely to offer much help in the near term.