Nasdaq jumps most in nearly a year as Big Tech surges

Gains for major tech companies powered a 3.7% surge Monday in the Nasdaq, the largest jump for the index in almost a year.

The latest swing came a day after the tech-driven index sank more than 10% below its February peak.

The S&P 500 rose 1.4%. Markets have been adjusting to a rapid increase in longterm interest rates in the bond market over the past few weeks. That has helped pull money out of stocks, particularly tech companies that have been surging through the pandemic as more of daily life moves online.

A decline in bond yields Tuesday helped put that trend in reverse, perhaps temporarily.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury note dropped to 1.54% after trading above 1.60% a day earlier. Higher bond yields tend to pull money away from highpriced stocks like technology companies.

Financial sector stocks, which had benefited from the rise in bond yields, were lagging the rest of the market.

Yields have been climbing with rising expectations for growth and the inflation that could follow. Higher yields put downward pressure on stocks generally, in part because they can steer away dollars that might have gone into the stock market into bonds instead. That makes investors less willing to pay such high prices for stocks, especially those that look the most expensive, such as technology stocks.

“We’re going through a regime change and it’s not dissimilar to what we saw last year,” said Kristina Hooper, chief global market strategist at Invesco. “Now we’re seeing the reverse of that and an abrupt move like that creates an environment in which investors start to worry about valuations.”