The S&P 500 rose 0.58 per cent to a record 7,563.63 at Thursday's close in New York, the eighth record close of May, while the Nasdaq Composite added 0.91 per cent to a record 26,917.47 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average inched 0.05 per cent higher to 50,668.97. The session was dominated by chip-sector leadership and by traders digesting the reported sixty-day US-Iran memorandum of understanding that emerged from Muscat earlier in the day.
Semiconductors did most of the heavy lifting. SK Hynix's ADRs were up 4.8 per cent in New York after the Korean original closed at a record in Seoul; Micron Technology added a further 3.1 per cent on top of its trillion-dollar threshold crossing on Tuesday; and Nvidia gained 1.9 per cent to fresh highs. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index ended up 2.4 per cent and is now twenty-five per cent higher month-to-date, the strongest May for the chip benchmark since 2003.
Breadth was modestly better than Wednesday but still narrow. Two hundred and seventy-eight S&P 500 names finished higher, a small improvement on the prior session's 216. The equal-weighted index added 0.2 per cent, lagging the cap-weighted benchmark by three quarters of a percentage point. Software outperformed within tech as Salesforce's after-the-bell results from Wednesday continued to ripple through, the stock ending up 9.7 per cent.
The Iran headlines moved through the day. The S&P 500 was little changed for the first hour after the New York open before climbing roughly half a per cent on the Axios report of the sixty-day MoU; it gave back roughly a third of that gain in the afternoon as Trump told reporters he was "not satisfied" with the language. Most of the day's residual upside came from late chip buying rather than from any further geopolitical move.
Treasuries were marginally weaker. The two-year yield rose three basis points to 3.99 per cent and the ten-year added two basis points to 4.53 per cent. Federal-funds futures still imply two Fed cuts by year-end, with the September meeting now sixty-five per cent priced for a move. Friday's personal consumption expenditures release for April is the next macro catalyst, with consensus expecting headline at 2.3 per cent and core at 2.5 per cent.
Earnings flow over the next week is heavily skewed to enterprise software. Salesforce's Wednesday print and accompanying $300 million Anthropic token commitment have raised the bar for Workday, MongoDB and HashiCorp, all of which report next Wednesday and Thursday. NetApp and Veeva are reported as the other two largest software prints due, with Crowdstrike rounding out a week traders described as "the software referendum."