NEW YORK (AP) — Wall Street is holding steadier Monday following its three-week losing streak.
The S&P 500 was 0.4% higher in early trading, coming off its longest weekly losing streak since September. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 44 points, or 0.1%, as of 9:40 a.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 0.7% higher.
Zions Bancorp. climbed after reporting stronger earnings for the latest quarter than expected. Analysts called it a solid showing, and its stock rose 2.7% to recover some of the sharp slide they took last year on worries surrounding the strength of the larger regional banking industry.
That helped offset a 3.7% drop for Tesla, which announced more cuts to prices over the weekend. Elon Musk’s electric-vehicle company has seen its stock drop more than 40% already this year, and it will report its first-quarter results on Tuesday.
It’s a big week for earnings reports, with roughly 30% of the companies in the S&P 500 on the schedule to say how much they made during the year’s first three months. That includes several companies that have come to be known as part of the “Magnificent Seven,” beyond Tesla. This handful of companies was responsible for the majority of the S&P 500’s big gain last year, raising the bar of expectations for them to meet to justify their stock prices.
Analysts believe those seven stocks, as a group, saw growth in their earnings per share slow to 39% last quarter from 63% at the end of last year, according to strategists at Bank of America. This past quarter may also have marked the trough for earnings declines among the other 493 companies in the index. The narrowing growth difference between them and the Magnificent Seven 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 quite as bad as analysts expected. It cited price increases and other measures to support its revenue.
Verizon’s stock swung from an early gain to a loss of 1.2% after it reported weaker revenue for the first quarter than expected and kept its forecast for full-year profit the same.
Even more pressure than usual is on companies broadly 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.
Top officials at the Federal Reserve warned last week that they may need to keep interest rates high for a while in order to ensure high inflation is heading down to their 2% target.
The yield on the 10-year Treasury inched up to 4.64% from 4.63% late Friday. The two-year Treasury yield, which moves more closely with expectations for the Fed, slipped to 4.97% from 4.99%.
In markets abroad, stocks rose 1.8% in Hong Kong but fell 0.7% in Shanghai after the People’s Bank of China kept its 1-year and 5-year loan prime rates unchanged. The Chinese central bank is waiting to see if more stimulus is needed after the economy expanded at a faster-than-expected rate in the first three months of the year, according to analysts.
Indexes were higher across much of the rest of Asia and Europe.
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AP Business Writers Matt Ott and Elaine Kurtenbach contributed.