S&P 500 climbs as Alphabet leads rally in tech

Investing.com -- The S&P 500 extended its rally Thursday, underpinned by better-than-expected quarterly earnings and a Google-led surge in tech after the search-engine giant launched its Chat-GPT rival, Baird, in Europe and Brazil.

The S&P 500 rose 0.8%, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.15%, or 49 points, and the Nasdaq was up 1.4%.

PepsiCo, Delta kick off earnings on solid footing

PepsiCo Inc (NASDAQ:PEP) reported better-than-expected second-quarter results and lifted its full outlook as price hikes helped offset higher input costs. Its shares rose more than 2%.

Delta Air Lines (NYSE:DAL) reported record quarter results that topped Wall Street estimates, though sentiment on the stock cooled somewhat after the airline said capacity constraints were expected to remain for an “extended period.”

Alphabet pushes tech higher amid AI fever

Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) rose more than 4% after launching Bard AI, in Brazil and the European Union, as the tech giant looks to take the AI fight to rival ChatGPT.

Google Search, which still makes up the bulk of Alphabet’s revenue, will likely become "more personalized” and develop “critical competitive moats” as the tech giant invests further in AI, Morgan Stanley said in a note.

Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ:META), meanwhile, was also riding the AI wave as the social media giant is set to release a commercial version of its AI large learning model, which was made available to researchers and academics earlier this year.

Sentiment on Meta was also boosted after TD Cowen upgraded the social media giant to outperform from perform on expectations that performance will likely be boosted by further cost cuts and monetization from Reels and Threads.

Inflation shows further signs of slowing, but job market remains hot

Just a day after investors cheered slowing consumer price pressures, producer prices in June also slowed more than expected, according to the data released Thursday.

The Price producer index rose 0.1% in June, compared with expectations for a 0.2% rise, showing that “earlier policy initiatives are already working to cool inflation towards the Fed’s intended goal, particularly on the producer side,” Stifel said in a note.

Weekly jobless claims, however, fell more than expected in the week ended July 7, signaling that the labor market remains too strong for the Fed to signal that it may stop raising rates after a widely expected hike next week.

“We're going to probably see the Fed move [focus] towards the tightness in that labor market as a bigger factor than where just top-line prices go at this point,” Brian Mulberry, client portfolio manager at Zacks Investment Management told Investing.com's Yasin Ebrahim in an interview on Wednesday.

Amazon drives in gains following record Prime Day

Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) rose more than 2% after reporting that U.S. online sales from its Prime Day promotional campaign jumped 6.1% to $12.7 billion.

During the two-day sales bonanza, 375 million items were sold worldwide, making it the biggest Prime Day event ever, according to Amazon.