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Investing.com — U.S. stock markets opened higher on Monday, as encouraging newsflow over the weekend on the hunt for a vaccine to treat the Covid-19 virus helped to restore confidence in the ability of the market to bounce from last week’s setback.
By 9:35 AM ET (1335 GMT), the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 185 points, or 0.7% at 27,851 points, while the S&P 500 was up 1.0% and the Nasdaq Composite was up 1.4%. The corrections in both of the latter indexes had stopped on Friday more or less in line with their respective 50-day moving averages, a development that leaves them well placed to rebound this week, according to some technical analysts.
Last week had been the worst since March for the major boards, but the weekend brought some relief, as Pfizer (NYSE:PFE) CEO Albert Bourla told CBS that the company’s vaccine could be ready for distribution within the U.S. by the end of the year. Pfizer stock was up 1.3%, while the stock of its partner in Covid vaccine development, German-based Biontech (NASDAQ:BNTX), was up 4.8%.
The market was also supported by the news of some big acquisitions over the weekend, with chipmaker Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA)’s stock rising 8.1% on the back of its $40 billion cash-and-stock acquisition of U.K. chip designer ARM from Softbank (OTC:SFTBY), and Immunomedics (NASDAQ:IMMU) stock more than doubling after Gilead Sciences (NASDAQ:GILD) offered to pay $21 billion for the biotech company.
The Nvidia acquisition would transform it into a global leader in chipset design. For that reason, the Chinese-based Global Times argued on Monday that Beijing could be inclined to refuse antitrust clearance, fearing that Huawei would no longer have access to ARM’s designs.
