By Caroline Valetkevitch
NEW YORK (Reuters) – U.S. stocks were higher on Tuesday afternoon, helped by gains in financial shares, while investors awaited key inflation reports and the start of second-quarter earnings in the coming days.
Investors are looking for further clues on whether price pressures are abating and if the Federal Reserve is nearing the end of its interest rate hiking cycle.
U.S. consumer price data is due on Wednesday, while a producer prices report is due on Thursday.
JPMorgan Chase & Co shares gained 1.5% after Jefferies upgraded the stock to a “buy” ahead of the bank’s quarterly results due on Friday.
Results from JPMorgan and other big banks later this week are expected to unofficially kick off the start of the second-quarter reporting period. The S&P banking index was up 1.4%.
“It’s nice to see the market broadening out here ahead of earnings,” said Tim Ghriskey, senior portfolio strategist at Ingalls & Snyder in New York.
“We’ve got a lot of data that’s going to be coming in here … and expectations for the third quarter are also a concern in terms of any guidance companies might be giving on earnings calls.”
The S&P 500 is up about 15% for the year so far, with technology up roughly 39% in that period.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 210.5 points, or 0.62%, to 34,154.9, the S&P 500 gained 11.32 points, or 0.26%, to 4,420.85 and the Nasdaq Composite added 4.64 points, or 0.03%, to 13,690.12.
Among the day’s gainers, Amazon.com was up 0.7% with its “Prime Day” 48-hour shopping event going on this week.
Also, Salesforce rose 3.1% after the cloud services firm said it would increase prices of some of its cloud and marketing tools, a first in seven years.
Advancing issues outnumbered declining ones on the NYSE by a 2.79-to-1 ratio; on Nasdaq, a 1.53-to-1 ratio favored advancers.
The S&P 500 posted 45 new 52-week highs and one new low; the Nasdaq Composite recorded 81 new highs and 34 new lows.
(Reporting by Caroline Valetkevitch in New York; Additional reporting by Johann M Cherian and Bansari Mayur Kamdar in Bengaluru; Editing by Maju Samuel and Matthew Lewis)
