Stock market today: Wall Street recovers from its worst week since April as Big Tech rebounds

NEW YORK -- U.S. stocks are climbing Monday and clawing back some of the losses from their worst week since April.

The S&P 500 was up 0.7% in early trading. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 167 points, or 0.4%, as of 9:35 a.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 1.1% higher.

Big Tech stocks regained some of their sharp drops from last week to support the market. Nvidia and others had sputtered amid criticism they’d grown too expensive after rocketing so high. Two of them, Alphabet and Tesla, will report on Tuesday how much profit they earned during the spring in a big test. They each rose at least 2%.

Treasury yields were holding relatively steady in the bond market after President Joe Biden said he won’t run for re-election. The move could cause the unwind of some of the market’s “Trump trade,” which took off after Biden’s weak performance in a debate last month raised expectations for a win by former President Donald Trump.

Bank stocks had climbed on forecasts for lighter regulations following a Republican sweep, for example, and longer-term Treasury yields climbed more than short-term ones on expectations for policies that would push up the government’s debt.

But Biden’s stepping aside over the weekend wasn’t that big a surprise for the market. “It was a matter of when, not if,” according to Brian Jacobsen, chief economist at Annex Wealth Management.

“This could lower the odds of Trump winning, but the Democrats have to rally around a candidate first.”

The yield on the 10-year Treasury eased to 4.22% from 4.24% late Friday. Shorter-term yields, meanwhile, were holding firm. The two-year yield remained at 4.52%, where it was late Friday.

Other corners of the market that could have swung sharply on uncertainty about the election were also mostly quiet. The U.S. dollar’s value was steady against its biggest rivals.

In the meantime, reports on corporate profits and the U.S. economy’s growth could continue to grab the market’s spotlight.

Verizon Communications tumbled 6.1% after reporting profit for the latest quarter that matched analysts’ expectations but revenue that fell just short.

Besides the two Big Tech stocks, dozens of other big U.S. companies will also report their latest quarterly results this week, including Coca-Cola, Ford and American Airlines.

Airlines last week felt massive disruptions from a global technology outage, which appeared to have been resolved over the weekend though delays at airports continued Monday.

A faulty software update caused havoc worldwide and led to the grounding by almost all airlines of a number of flights. The vast majority of cancellations early Monday were Delta Air Lines flights. Delta’s stock lost 3.5%.

Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike said the issue believed to be behind the outage was not a security incident or cyberattack and that it had deployed a fix. The company said the problem lay in a faulty update sent to computers running Microsoft Windows.

CrowdStrike’s stock was down another 8.4% Monday after taking an 11.1% hit on Friday.

In stock markets abroad, indexes rose across much of Europe.

In Asia, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng rose 1.3%, and stocks fell 0.6% in Shanghai after China’s central bank unexpectedly lowered a benchmark interest rate for loans. The move came after the government recently reported the world’s second-largest economy expanded at a slower-than-forecast pace in the second quarter.

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AP Business Writer Matt Ott contributed.