Wall Street hits a record as S&P 500 continues its 2-week rally on hopes for an end to the Iran war

Kash Pashootan, founder and chief executive officer of First Avenue Investment Counsel, joins BNN Bloomberg to share stocks to keep on your radar.

NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. stock market hit a record Wednesday after adding to its two-week rally built on hopes the war with Iran won’t create a worst-case scenario for the global economy.

Whether Wall Street is correct to have so much hope for peace and whether stocks should be the highest they’ve ever been remains to be seen.

The S&P 500 rose 0.8 per cent and eclipsed its prior all-time high set in January. After falling nearly 10 per cent below its record  in late March, a drop steep enough that Wall Street calls it a “correction,” the index at the heart of many 401(k) accounts has since roared more than 10 per cent higher.

Much of the rally has been due to expectations for calming tensions in the war and a resumption of the full flow of oil from the Persian Gulf to customers worldwide. Hopes remained high Wednesday as regional officials told The Associated Press that the United States and Iran had an “in principle agreement” to extend a ceasefire  to allow for more diplomacy.

To be sure, stocks could easily get back to falling if those expectations get undercut, which has happened before in the war. Oil prices drifted up and down Wednesday and showed that caution remains in financial markets. Stock indexes around the world also made only modest movements following their big gains in recent weeks.

The price for a barrel of Brent crude, the international standard, added 0.1 per cent to settle at US$94.93. That’s still well above its roughly US$70 price from before the war, though it’s down from its US$119 peak when worries about the fighting have been at their heights.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average dipped 72 points, or 0.1 per cent, while the Nasdaq composite gained 1.6 per cent.

But if U.S.-Iran talks do happen and if they are successful, the war could end up being just a temporary setback for the global economy instead of a new normal of very high oil prices and inflation. And that in turn could allow investors to return their attention to what matters most for stock prices: money.

Through all the day-to-day noise that can affect investors’ opinions, stock prices tend to move with the direction of corporate profits over the long term. And positive trends there had stock markets doing well before the war began. Analysts also see continued growth ahead, for now at least.

Bank of America rose 1.8 per cent after saying it made US$8.6 billion in profit during the first three months of the year, more than analysts expected. CEO Brian Moynihan also said the bank saw signs of a “resilient American economy,” including solid spending by U.S. consumers.

Morgan Stanley jumped 4.5 per cent after the investment bank likewise delivered a better-than-expected quarter of results.

Companies hurt earlier in the year by worries about artificial-intelligence technology also rose to recover more of their losses for 2026. Some of the concerns were about companies potentially spending too much to build out AI capabilities, while others focused on businesses that may go obsolete because of AI-powered competition.

The worries got so deep that they shook private-credit companies that have lent money to software businesses and others potentially under threat because of AI.

ServiceNow climbed 7.3 per cent, Oracle rose 4.2 per cent and Ares Management gained 5.9 per cent for some of Wednesday’s bigger gains in the S&P 500. All are still down between 12 per cent and 39 per cent for the year so far.

With stock prices overall back to where they were in January, and with analysts’ expectations for upcoming profits from big U.S. companies only rising since then, optimists say many stocks look less expensive than they did a few months ago.

“Today, we see compelling opportunity potential” to shift into areas of the market that look like better buys than earlier this year, such as technology stocks, said Mason Mendez, investment strategy analyst at Wells Fargo Investment Institute.

The stock price of Allbirds surged 582 per cent to nearly US$17 after the company said it’s shifting gears and moving into the AI compute infrastructure industry, while changing its name to NewBird AI. The Allbirds name will stay with the shoe brand that the company has already agreed to sell to American Exchange Group.

Nike rose 2.8 per cent after CEO Elliott Hill and Tim Cook — a Nike director and the CEO of Apple — disclosed that they purchased a combined 48,000 shares of the athletic shoe maker at a cost of about US$1 million each. Nike shares are still down nearly 29 per cent this year.

On the losing end of Wall Street was Live Nation Entertainment. It fell 6.3 per cent after a jury found the concert giant and its Ticketmaster subsidiary had a harmful monopoly over big concert venues.

All told, the S&P 500 rose 55.57 points to 7,022.95. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dipped 72.27 to 48,463.72, and the Nasdaq composite rose 376.93 to 24,016.02.

In stock markets abroad, indexes were mixed in Europe following modest gains in Asia. South Korea’s Kospi was an outlier and jumped 2.1 per cent.

In the bond market, the yield on the 10-year Treasury rose to 4.28 per cent from 4.26 per cent late Tuesday.

___

Stan Choe, The Associated Press. AP Business Writers Yuri Kageyama and Matt Ott contributed to this report.