Investing.com -- The Dow closed higher Tuesday, underpinned by a fall in Treasury yields as dovish remarks from some Federal Reserve officials boosted bets on rate cuts.
By 16:00 ET (21:00 GMT), the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 83 points, or 0.2%, the S&P 500 was 0.1% higher and the NASDAQ Composite rose 0.3%.
The main Wall Street indices are on course to post strong gains in November - the DJIA set to finish the month 6.9% higher, the S&P 500 up 8.5% and the technology-heavy Nasdaq 10.8% higher.
Treasury yields slip as Fed speak boosts rate-cut hopes
Federal Reserve Board Governor Christopher Waller said he was "increasingly confident" that policy is currently well positioned to slow the economy and get inflation back to 2% target.
Adding to clout to bets of a Fed rate cut early next year, Waller added that should data show disinflation continuing for several more months, the Fed "could then start lowering the policy rate just because inflation's lower."
Treasury yields fell on the remarks, with the yield on United States 2-Year falling nearly 12 basis points to about 4.74%, while the yield on the United States 10-Year fell 6 basis points to 4.330%.
The remarks come just ahead of the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge, the personal consumption expenditures price index, on Thursday, which is expected to have risen just 0.1% on the month in November, a drop from 0.4% in September.
Retailers in focus after Cyber Monday sales hit record
Sentiment on retailers were boosted by ongoing signs that the consumer remains in good shape after consumer confidence in November surprised to the upside, while Cyber Monday sales hit a record high.
Consumer spending on Cyber Monday, the biggest U.S. online shopping day, is expected to have surged to an all-time high of over $12 billion, according to preliminary estimates from Adobe (NASDAQ:ADBE) Digital Insights cited by Reuters.
Walmart (NYSE:WMT) and Foot Locker Inc (NYSE:FL) were among a slew of retailers in the ascendency, while payments platform Affirm (NASDAQ:AFRM) jumped nearly 12% as record number of holiday shoppers likely used buy now, pay later services.
Micron boosts outlook, Zscaler cuts losses
Zscaler (NASDAQ:ZS) cut loses to close 1% higher after the cybersecurity company lifted its full-year guidance after reporting quarterly results that topped Wall Street estimates.
The firm also left its billings guidance unchanged, but Wedbush said the guidance represented "a conservative and prudent bar in our view given the underlying strength that ZS is seeing in the field."
Micron Technology Inc (NASDAQ:MU) raised its profit and revenue guidance for its fiscal first-quarter, but the stock fell nearly 2% as the chipmaker also lifted its forecast on annual expenses to about $990 million from $900 million previously.
Energy stocks as oil rides bets on deeper production cuts ahead of OPEC+ meeting higher
Energy stocks were one of the biggest gainers on the day as oil prices rose on hopes that OPEC+ will agree to extend or even deepen its ongoing production cuts at a meeting later this week on Thursday.
Hess Corporation (NYSE:HES), Chevron Corp (NYSE:CVX) and EOG Resources Inc (NYSE:EOG) more among the biggest gainers.
Amazon takes fight to Microsoft with launch of new chip, AI bot
Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) cloud business, Amazon Web Services, unveiled a new chip for customers to develop artificial intelligence applications and tech giant also said it would offer Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA)'s latest chips. The move comes after Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) recently announced its own AI chip and also said customers of Azure cloud platform would have access to Nvidia's GPUs.
Amazon also announced Amazon Q, a new chatGPT-style AI-powered chatbot, that will help customers solve AWS-related queries.
(Peter Nurse and Oliver Gray contributed to this report.)