US Stock Market Today: S&P 500, Nasdaq Open Higher In Shortened Trading Session

Wall Street opened higher on Friday as traders came back from the Thanksgiving holiday for a shortened trading session.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 98 points, or 0.2% at open. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite advanced 0.2% and 0.3%, respectively.

All but one of the eleven sectoral indices on the S&P 500 were trading in green led by energy and telecom stocks, with only healthcare counter seeing decline.

A fall in tech stocks have weighed on US benchmarks this month, as doubt swirled around the future profitability of artificial intelligence companies. However, expectations that the US Federal Reserve will cut interest rates faster than initially anticipated fueled a late-month rebound.

Among major companies, shares of Intel Corp. jumped 5%. Drugmaker Eli Lilly Co. and Oracle Corp. were both down over 2%.

The yield on the 10-year US Treasury bond was flat at 4%.

The US dollar index was unchanged against major currencies at 99.65. The euro and pound were down 0.1%.

In commodities, oil prices were on track for a fourth monthly decline as traders looked ahead to this weekend’s OPEC+ meeting and assessed how a possible Ukraine peace agreement might influence an already oversupplied market. Brent was down 0.1% at $63.3 per barrel.

Spot gold prices rose 1% to $4,197.97 an ounce after traders faced a volatile session as an outage in the Chicago Mercantile Exchange rippled through trading. The disruption affected activity across contracts including gold futures and Comex options, often used to hedge exposure to London prices, as per a Bloomberg News report.