Investing.com - Wall Street opened higher on Monday as strong earnings, along with mergers & acquisitions boosted sentiment and data came out largely in line with expectations.
At 9:39AM ET (13:39GMT), the Dow Jones rose 143 points, or 0.59%, the S&P 500 gained 12 points, or 0.45%, while the Nasdaq Composite traded up 32 points, or 0.44%.
A busy week for earnings, with 145 S&P 500 firms reporting, started off on the right foot Monday. McDonald’s (NYSE:MCD) saw shares surge 4.7% after the fast-food giant reported a 5.5% increase in global same store sales, easily topping estimates for a 3.9% rise.
A series of multi-billion dollar deals also boosted investor sentiment on Monday. Marathon Petroleum (NYSE:MPC) agreed to buy oil refiner Andeavor (NYSE:ANDV) for around $23 billion.
Sprint (NYSE:S) and T-Mobile (NASDAQ:TMUS) formally announced a merger in a deal worth approximately $26 billion. The all-stock transaction represents a total implied enterprise value of approximately $59 billion for Sprint and approximately $146 billion for the combined company.
Over in the UK, Walmart’s (NYSE:WMT) British unit Asda and Sainsbury’s (LON:SBRY) confirmed they had agreed a £15 billion ($20.6 billion) merger to create Britain's biggest supermarket group by market share, surpassing current leader Tesco (LON:TSCO). The sale of Asda marks Walmart’s operational exit from the UK although the U.S. retail giant will maintain a 42% share in the new company.
Meanwhile, consumer spending and inflation data released earlier on Monday matched expectations. Personal spending picked up to a 0.4% gain in March, doubling the rise seen in the previous month.
While inflation data included in the report accelerated, with the core personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index and PCE deflator rising to 1.9% and 2.0%, respectively, stock markets seemed to take the increase in stride.
Minutes of the prior Fed meeting on March 20-21 showed that policymakers had forecast the move due to soft comparisons in 2017 and that those effects would not “by itself, would not justify a change in the projected path (of monetary policy)”.
The Fed is not expected to make a move on interest rates at the end of its two-policy meeting starting on Tuesday. Markets are currently pricing in the next hike for the June meeting with follow-up increase in September. A third move in December is currently a coin toss.
Still ahead on Monday, the Chicago purchasing managers’ index for April and March pending home sales will be released at 9:45AM ET (13:34GMT) and 10:00AM GMT, respectively.