Stocks rise again with tech-related shares; dollar gains

NEW YORK (Reuters) -Most stock indexes climbed on Friday, with the Nasdaq up more than 1% in afternoon trading as tech-related shares gained, while the dollar headed for its first weekly rise in over a month.

Helping Nasdaq, shares of Google parent Alphabet were up 1.5% after it beat profit expectations and reaffirmed AI spending targets.

Uncertainty surrounding the impacts of U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff offensive and the resulting global trade tensions have dominated earnings calls this results season.

Trump said in an interview published Friday that tariff negotiations were underway with China, but Beijing denied any talks were taking place, the latest in a series of conflicting signals over what progress was being made to de-escalate a trade war threatening to sap global growth.

Trump told Time magazine that talks were taking place and that Chinese President Xi Jinping had called him.

Tit-for-tat tariffs that began with Trump’s announcement of hefty import levies on April 2 had threatened to stall trade between the world’s two biggest economies and sparked fears of a slowdown in global growth.

“This week you’ve seen kind of relief that maybe some of the worst case of the Trump tariff actions won’t come true,” said Chip Rewey, CIO of Rewey Asset Management, a registered investment adviser based in New Jersey.

“While we’ve recovered from some of the lows, we haven’t pushed back to highs. And I think somewhere in that range is where we’ll stay for a while.”

The S&P 500 was set to gain for the week, while Europe’s STOXX 600 rose more than 2% on the week.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 14.98 points, or 0.04%, to 40,108.31, the S&P 500 rose 33.83 points, or 0.62%, to 5,518.60 and the Nasdaq Composite rose 182.65 points, or 1.07%, to 17,349.66.

MSCI’s gauge of stocks across the globe rose 4.47 points, or 0.54%, to 824.28. The pan-European STOXX 600 index ended up 0.35%.

In Japan, the Nikkei was up 1.8% on Friday and has regained all its losses since Trump’s announcement of the highest U.S. tariffs in 100 years – levies he largely suspended, except for China and a baseline tariff of 10%.

After taking a beating in recent weeks due to tariff news and a flight from U.S. assets, the dollar recovered slightly against the euro and yen.

The dollar index, which measures the greenback against a basket of currencies including the yen and the euro,

rose 0.07% to 99.49, with the euro down 0.1% at $1.1377.

Against the Japanese yen, the dollar strengthened 0.66% to 143.56.

Gold prices, which have soared this year as investors sought safe-haven assets decoupled from the dollar, were last down 1.94% at $3,283.21 an ounce on Friday.

The yield on benchmark U.S. 10-year notes fell 3.7 basis points to 4.268%, from 4.305% late on Thursday. U.S. Treasury yields declined following recent hopes of an easing in the U.S.-China trade war and as investors weighed the possibility that the Federal Reserve could pivot toward lower interest rates as economic activity slows.

(Reporting by Caroline Valetkevitch; Additional reporting by Tom Westbrook in Singapore; Editing by Joe Bavier and Lisa Shumaker)