Stocks open higher, crypto rally as quarter-end approaches: Stock market news today

by Arthur · March 29, 2023

Shares rose early Wednesday as investors see the end of an eventful first quarter that has seen a banking crisis erupt, a crypto winter show signs of thawing and last year’s stock market performance reversed for the time being.

At the open, the S&P 500 (^GSPC) rose 0.9% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI) was higher by 0.7%. The technology-heavy Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC) led the way, rising 1.2% at the open.

With the first quarter set to end Friday, the Nasdaq is up nearly 12%, the S&P 500 is up more than 3% so far this year, and the Dow lags behind, falling 2.2% in 2023.

This relative performance is a reversal from what was seen last year when the Nasdaq fell nearly 30%, the S&P 500 lost over 18% and the Dow fell a more modest 9%.

The price of crude oil was also higher early Wednesday, rising 1.2% to trade near $74 a barrel.

Bitcoin (BTC-USD) was also notably higher, rising more than 5% to trade north of $28,000. So far this year, bitcoin is up more than 70%.

Wednesday’s rise comes amid a somewhat slower calendar of corporate and financial news, with earnings last night from Micron Technology ( MU ) and Lululemon ( LULU ) the main highlights early in the trading session.

Micron shares rose more than 4% early Wednesday after the chip giant hinted last night that its chip business could be turning a corner, with CEO Sanjay Mehrotra telling investors “we are close to a transition to sequential revenue growth in our quarterly results.”

Micron reported revenue for its fiscal second quarter on Tuesday that was down about 10% from the previous quarter and more than 50% lower than the same period last year.

Mehrotra also mentioned the potential positive effects that recent investor enthusiasm around AI advances could have on the industry, telling investors: “Recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) provide an exciting prelude to the transformative power of large language models, or LLMs, such as such as ChatGPT, which requires significant amounts of memory and storage to function. We are only in the early stages of the widespread adoption of these AI technologies and potential exponential growth in commercial use cases.”

Lululemon shares, meanwhile, rose as much as 12% on Wednesday after reporting top- and bottom-line results that beat estimates, with revenue rising 30% in the fourth quarter as comparable-store sales rose 27%.