US stocks: Wall Street ends up as banks gain following results; chips rally with TSMC

[NEW YORK] US stocks rose on Thursday after two days of declines as Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs shares shot up following upbeat quarterly results, while Taiwan-based chipmaker TSMC’s blockbuster results boosted shares of US chipmakers.

Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley both reported a rise in quarterly profit, helped by a flurry of dealmaking.

Shares of Goldman and Morgan Stanley were sharply higher.

This week, other banks reported mixed results that weighed on the sector, along with worries about US President Donald Trump’s proposed one-year cap that would limit credit-card interest rates to 10 per cent.

Investors are still buying stocks that are undervalued compared with tech, said Jake Dollarhide, chief executive officer of Longbow Asset Management in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

“It’s been growth, tech or bust in this market,” he said. And today, “it’s the banks and old-school industrials” that are also doing well.

Tech stocks also rose on Thursday. The world’s main producer of advanced artificial intelligence chips, TSMC, predicted robust annual growth and flagged more US manufacturing capacity was in the works. US-listed shares of TSMC jumped.

An index of semiconductors shot up. Shares of Nvidia, Broadcom and chipmaking tool company Applied Materials all climbed.

According to preliminary data, the S&P 500 gained 18.37 points, or 0.26 per cent, to end at 6,944.57 points, while the Nasdaq Composite gained 58.27 points, or 0.25 per cent, to 23,530.02. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 296.60 points, or 0.60 per cent, to 49,446.23.

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With tech, “there was some worry as far as valuations - that they were getting a little too far ahead of themselves,” said Alan Lancz, president of Alan B. Lancz & Associates, an investment advisory firm, based in Toledo, Ohio.

“That’s been kind of squashed this morning with the news from Taiwan Semiconductor.”

Richly valued tech and growth stocks have lost some momentum recently as investors kicked off the year by chasing bargains.

Both mid-caps and the small-cap Russell 2000 have been outperforming the S&P 500 so far this year.

Among other financial companies, BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, gained after a rally in markets lifted fee income and pushed its assets under management to a record US$14.04 trillion in the fourth quarter.

Results from the banks essentially have kicked off the fourth-quarter US earnings season. REUTERS