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Investing.com — U.S. st0ck markets opened higher on Friday as some solid earnings reports helped investors to look through a disturbing surge in Covid-19 cases and look ahead to the time when vaccines will be widely available to bring the pandemic under control.
By 9:40 AM ET (1440 GMT), the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 218 points, or 0.8%, at 29,298 points. The S&P 500 was also up 0.8% and the NASDAQ Composite was up 0.9%.
The broad move higher was in sharp contrast to the pattern for much of this week, which started with cyclicals and old-economy names benefiting at the expense of tech and growth stocks on Monday in response to Pfizer (NYSE:PFE)’s announcement that its experimental vaccine for Covid-19 was over 90% effective. That rotation reversed over the rest of the week as markets absorbed both the challenges in getting vaccines distributed and the worsening current situation. The U.S. posted over 153,000 new cases on Thursday, a new record, while the seven-day average death rate rose to over 1,000 for the first time since August.
Among the early movers, networking gear maker Cisco Systems Inc (NASDAQ:CSCO) stock rose 7.0% on the back of better-than-expected results for its fiscal first quarter and the promise that it would snap a year-long streak of falling revenues in the current quarter.
Walt Disney (NYSE:DIS), which like Cisco reported earnings after the closing bell on Thursday, also rose, albeit by a more modest 2.3%, after its quarterly numbers were rescued by a strong performance from its Disney+ streaming unit. Lower box office revenues and capacity-constrained theme parks still made for a second straight quarterly loss, however.
DraftKings (NASDAQ:DKNG) stock rose 7.0% after the sport betting company said its monthly users passed the 1 million mark for the first time in the last quarter.
There was little reaction to data released earlier showing that producer prices had increased more rapidly than expected in October, with most of the increase coming through food prices. The producer price index rose 0.3% on the month, but the core PPI that excludes food and energy rose only 0.1%.
