FiscalFusion

Amazon led the U.S. stock market on Friday to the finish of another winning week and month, with the S&P 500 rising 0.3% and pulling closer to its all-time high set on Tuesday as it closed out a third straight winning week and a sixth straight winning month, its longest monthly streak since 2021. The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 40 points, or 0.1%, and the Nasdaq composite gained 0.6%. Amazon surged 9.6% and was by far the strongest force lifting the market after reporting profit for the latest quarter that blew past analysts’ expectations, with CEO Andy Jassy saying growth in its cloud-computing business has accelerated to a pace not seen since 2022.

Amazon’s roughly $2.4 trillion size means its movements heavily influence the S&P 500, and without it the index would have been down for the day. Apple, despite being worth more than $4 trillion, had a smaller impact as it swung between modest gains and losses before finishing down 0.4%; it also topped profit expectations, though not by as much as Amazon, with CEO Tim Cook citing strong revenue from iPhones and services. Reddit rose 7.5% after beating profit and revenue forecasts, Coinbase climbed 4.6% after profit also topped expectations, and Netflix added 2.7% after announcing a 10-for-1 stock split to make shares more affordable while preserving investors’ value. These gains helped offset AbbVie’s 4.5% drop, as the drugmaker beat profit estimates by a smaller margin than before and faced high expectations following a 28.4% year-to-date gain.

Companies are under pressure to deliver large profit growth to justify big stock price gains since April amid rising criticism that the market has become too expensive. On Thursday, the S&P 500 slumped 1% as investors grew uneasy over heavy AI-related spending plans from Meta Platforms and Microsoft, and skepticism persisted about President Donald Trump’s trade truce with China. On Friday, Microsoft fell another 1.5% and Meta sank 2.7%, becoming the heaviest drags on the market. All told, the S&P 500 rose 17.86 points to 6,840.20, the Dow climbed to 47,562.87, and the Nasdaq advanced 143.81 points to 23,724.96.

Overseas, markets dipped in Europe following a mixed session in Asia, where Hong Kong fell 1.4% and Shanghai dropped 0.8% after data showed Chinese factory activity contracted for a seventh straight month, while Japan’s Nikkei 225 jumped 2.1% to another record after stronger-than-expected industrial production data. In the bond market, Treasury yields eased after rising midweek when Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell warned that another rate cut in December “is not a foregone conclusion — far from it.” The 10-year Treasury yield dipped to 4.09% from 4.11%, still above the 3.99% level before Powell’s comments. Other central banks have recently paused or halted rate cuts, and “it seems this is it for the 2025 easing season in developed economies,” economists at Bank of America wrote in a BofA Global Research report..