The end of the trading week saw a notable bull run toward tech stocks. Buoyed by solid quarterly results from some of the sector’s big players, investors plowed into a great many companies in the industry. This resulted in a broad rally throughout, lifting share prices in many tech segments.
Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG)(NASDAQ: GOOGL), for instance, saw both of its listed stocks creep up almost 1%, while semiconductor and other components specialist Broadcom (NASDAQ: AVGO) enjoyed a 2% gain. Content delivery network (CDN) and cybersecurity company Cloudflare (NYSE: NET) and cloud services provider Datadog (NASDAQ: DDOG) rose a respective 4% and nearly 6%.
The tech sector was having a moment
The week was a banner one for tech stocks. On Thursday alone, Meta Platforms (owner of Facebook and Instagram) and Amazon both reported boffo, estimates-beating quarters. That breathed even more life into a resurgent sector that has been looking very robust so far this year.
The two tech bellwethers — Meta in social media, and Amazon in both e-commerce and cloud computing with its Amazon Web Services (AWS) — have previously posted quarters that were well better than expected. These felt a bit different, though, as Meta declared its first-ever dividend, and Amazon benefited from its customers purchasing an astounding 1 billion-plus items through its site during the Black Friday/Cyber Monday period alone.
So for a brief, shining moment, the tech sector as a whole could do no wrong. Users and clients are obviously hungry to use a very wide variety of services, no matter whether they’re specialty cloud offerings, search enhancements, or content delivery network offerings to get their online videos playing more smoothly.
Adding fuel to this happy bonfire was today’s latest Labor Department release of the nation’s monthly employment figures. Jobs continue to be added to the economy, with employers taking on 353,000 workers in the first month of 2024.
And a revision to December numbers tacked on an extra 100,000 jobs. This is still a humming economy, and a humming economy needs good tech.
Looking forward to even better days
Can the rally continue? I believe it surely can, and likely will. We’re in the thick of earnings season, and there is still a host of notable tech stocks that are set to report their latest quarterly figures. We shouldn’t be surprised to see even more winning days for the broader sector in the immediate future.
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Suzanne Frey, an executive at Alphabet, is a member of The Motley Fool’s board of directors. Randi Zuckerberg, a former director of market development and spokeswoman for Facebook and sister to Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is a member of The Motley Fool’s board of directors. John Mackey, former CEO of Whole Foods Market, an Amazon subsidiary, is a member of The Motley Fool’s board of directors. Eric Volkman has positions in Meta Platforms. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Amazon, Cloudflare, Datadog, and Meta Platforms. The Motley Fool recommends Broadcom. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Why Major Tech Stocks Like Alphabet and Broadcom Flew Higher on Friday was originally published by The Motley Fool