NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. stocks are drifting higher Tuesday after more companies said they made bigger profits at the end of last year than analysts expected.
The S&P 500 was up 0.5% in midday trading, as many markets around the world took only tentative steps following Donald Trump’s return to the White House on Monday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 337 points, or 0.8%, as of 11 a.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 0.1% higher.
Trump has promised sweeping moves to reshape global trade and the economy, often at the expense of other countries, but stock indexes in Asia and Europe mostly made only modest moves in mixed trading. U.S. Treasury yields eased in the bond market, giving back some of their big recent gains that cranked up the pressure on stock markets worldwide.
In the foreign-currency market, the values of both the Mexican peso and Canadian dollar fell against the U.S. dollar after Trump said he expects to put 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico starting on Feb. 1. Trump had threatened to place even stiffer tariffs on Chinese imports during his campaign, but he said Monday he wanted to have more discussions with the leader of the world’s second-largest economy.
The threat of widespread tariffs, along with the possibility of other policies that could swell the U.S. government’s debt, had been helping to send Treasury yields higher recently, which in turn knocked stock prices lower. To make up for the downward pressure that higher Treasury yields put on their stock prices, companies need to deliver stronger earnings growth.
Charles Schwab did just that on Tuesday and rose 3.8% after delivering a better profit report for the end of 2024 than analysts expected. It credited clients pouring more dollars in, as its total client assets rose 19% from a year earlier to $10.10 trillion.
3M climbed 4.2% after reporting profit and revenue for the end of 2024 that edged past analysts’ expectations The company behind Scotch tape and Command strips also gave forecasts for financial results in 2025 that were roughly in line with analysts’ expectations.
This earnings reporting season is still in its early days, but S&P 500 companies so far have been beating analysts’ expectations for earnings by double the rate they were doing at this time three months ago, according to Bank of America strategists Ohsung Kwon and Savita Subramanian.
The gains for Schwab and 3M helped offset a 12.8% drop for Walgreen Boots Alliance. The U.S. Justice Department accused Walgreens late Friday of filling millions of prescriptions without a legitimate purpose, including for dangerous amounts of opioids. In the lawsuit, the government says the drugstore chain’s pharmacists filled controlled substance prescriptions with clear red flags that indicated they were highly likely to be unlawful.
Walgreens, one of the country’s largest pharmacy chains with over 8,000 locations, said in a statement that it stands behind its pharmacists and “will not stand by and allow the government to put our pharmacists in a no-win situation, trying to comply with “rules” that simply do not exist.”
In the bond market, Treasury yields eased to give back some of the big gains they’d made in recent months amid worries about inflation remaining difficult to fully subdue.
The yield on the 10-year Treasury fell to 4.56% from 4.62% late Friday. Like the U.S. stock market, bond trading had been closed on Monday in observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
The 10-year Treasury yield has been regressing since an encouraging update on inflation last week, but it’s still well above where it was in September, when it was below 3.65%.
Morgan Stanley strategist Michael Wilson said the main driver for the overall U.S. stock market appears to be what such longer-term interest rates are doing. He expects the pattern to continue, where stocks drop when yields rise and vice-versa, at least until the 10-year Treasury yield falls below 4.50% on a sustainable basis, among other things.
In stock markets abroad, indexes rose slightly across Europe after finishing mixed in Asia.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index rose 0.9% after embattled Chinese property developer Country Garden got a reprieve on its deadline for working out an agreement with its creditors.
In the cryptocurrency market, which has surged amid hopes Trump will make Washington friendlier to the industry, bitcoin pulled back from its record above $109,000 set on Monday and was sitting below $104,000.
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AP Business Writers Yuri Kageyama and Matt Ott contributed.
