Stocks Rise as Calm Returns to Wall Street

Calm returned to Wall Street on Tuesday and tech stocks led US indexes broadly higher.

• The S&P 500 rose 43.31 points, or 0.7%, to 6,037.88 , a day after swinging sharply on worries that President Trump's tariffs could spark a trade war that would hurt economies around the world.
• The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 134.13 points, or 0.3%, to 44,556.04.
• The Nasdaq composite rose 262.06 points, or 1.4%, to 19,654.02 .

Trump on Monday agreed to delay tariffs on Canada and Mexico for a month but is pressing ahead against China, which retaliated on Tuesday by announcing its own tariffs on some US imports and an antitrust investigation into Google.

Palantir Technologies jumped 24% and was one of the strongest forces lifting the S&P 500 after reporting a stronger profit for the latest quarter than analysts expected, the AP reports. The company also issued forecasts for upcoming revenue that were ahead of analysts' projections, as CEO Alexander Karp said his company is at the "center of the AI revolution." Pharmaceutical giant Merck tumbled 9.1% despite beating sales and profit forecasts for the latest quarter. It gave a forecast for upcoming revenue that fell short of analysts' expectations, due partly to a pause in shipments of one of its top-selling products to China.

Elsewhere on Wall Street, stocks that had swung sharply a day before when worries were high about tariffs on Mexico and Canada were calmer. Auto makers had dropped because so much of their production occurs in Mexico, for example. But General Motors rose 1.4%, and Ford Motor climbed 2.5%.The stock price of Google's parent company, Alphabet, rose 2.5%—but dropped as much as 8% in after-hours trading after it reported fourth-quarter revenue below analysts' expectations, CNBC reports.

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