US: Stocks finish higher after choppy session

WALL Street stocks finished a choppy session modestly higher on Monday, at the start of a heavy week of corporate earnings from Bank of America, Netflix and others.

After last week’s surprisingly good results from JPMorgan Chase and other large banks, investors will digest updates from more major and midsized lenders as well as from electric automaker Tesla, consumer products company Procter & Gamble and others.

Oanda’s Edward Moya expects “serious deposit outflows” from smaller lenders, adding that “the focus is not about bank solvency, but on banking profitability.”

The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 0.3 per cent to end at 33,987.18.

The broad-based S&P 500 also advanced 0.3 per cent to 4,151.33, as did the tech-rich Nasdaq Composite Index, which finished at 12,157.72.

Among individual companies, shares of Google parent Alphabet slid 2.8 per cent following a New York Times report that Samsung was considering replacing Google as its default search engine with Microsoft’s Bing. This underscores the threat of new artificial intelligence offerings to the tech giant.

Meanwhile, Microsoft climbed 0.9 per cent.

Prometheus Biosciences surged almost 70 per cent after it agreed to be acquired by pharma giant Merck for nearly US$11 billion.

Prometheus is developing a treatment for autoimmune diseases, including ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease, dubbed PRA023. Shares of Merck dipped 0.3 per cent.

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US: S&P 500 opens flat as investors focus on earnings, Fed cues

Besides earnings, this week’s calendar includes housing starts data for March and a report from the Federal Reserve on financial conditions in the country. AFP