US equity markets advanced on Friday (28 April) despite another crushing session for First Republic Bank, with investors continuing to digest corporate earnings and the latest inflation reports - Dow rose +272-points or +0.80%, The broader S&P500 gained +0.83%, with Energy (up +1.47%), Financials (+1.19%), Real Estate (+1.15%), Materials (+1.13%) and Information Technology (+1.07%) rising over >1% to lead nine of the eleven primary sectors higher. Utilities (down -0.19%) and Consumer Discretionary (-0.04%) were the only primary sectors to settle in the red. Both the Dow and S&P500 logged their best single session advance since 6 January. The Nasdaq added +0.69% to settle at 12,226.58, logging its best single session gain since 16 March and marking the highest close for the technology-centric index since 12 September, 2022. Intel Corp rallied +4.02% as the once dominant chipmaker posted first quarter numbers after the closing bell of last Thursday’s (27 April) session that were a touch a head of consensus analyst forecasts. However, Amazon.com Inc fell -3.98% after the e-commerce and cloud-computing giant’s first quarter headline numbers released after the close of the previous session comfortably surpassed consensus estimates, but with analysts concerned about revenue growth in the Cloud unit. The small capitalisation Russell 2000 lost -0.49%.
