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Investing.com – The Dow extended its rally and hit fresh session highs on Monday, as bargain-hunting investors continued to pile into recently beaten-down tech stocks after the U.S. extended its measures to contain the Covid-19 pandemic through April.
The Dow rose 2.48%, or 536 points. The S&P 500 rallied 2.98% and the Nasdaq Composite rose 3.09%.
Anticipating a climb in coronavirus-related deaths in the U.S., President Donald Trump said on Sunday the U.S. containment measures, which include social distancing, would be extended to April 30. Infections in the U.S. rose to nearly 145,000, with about 2,600 deaths so far.
“(I)f we do things together well, almost perfectly, we could get in the range of 100,000 to 200,000 fatalities,” Dr. Deborah Birx, response coordinator for the White House Coronavirus Task Force, said in an interview on “TODAY.”
The extensions of the measures come as Italy, the epicenter of the outbreak in Europe, signaled that its somewhat aggressive lockdown measures were taking shape, with infections falling to 4,050 from 5,217 on Sunday, the lowest daily number of infections in two weeks.
The rally on Wall Street comes just days after President Donald Trump signed the $2 trillion stimulus package, the largest aid package in U.S. history, to ensure the economy bounces back quickly from a widely expected recession.
Tech spearheaded the rally in the broader market, with chip and FANG stocks among the biggest gains.
Micron Technology (NASDAQ:MU), Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM), NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (NASDAQ:AMD) were all sharply higher.
Energy, meanwhile, also participated in the broader rally, even as oil prices fell to 17-year lows, with no end in sight to the ongoing Saudi Arabia and Russia oil price war at a time when oil demand has been hurt by the coronavirus outbreak.
