Stock Market Today: Nasdaq Pops as Semiconductor Stocks Soar

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Stocks started the week on a positive note, with the main benchmarks building on last week's strong gains.

Amid a relatively bare economic calendar, market participants sifted through several single-stock headlines – including memory chipmaker Micron Technology (MU) being named a top pick among semiconductor stocks.

At the close, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 0.5% at 38,852, the S&P 500 was 1.0% higher at 5,180, and the Nasdaq Composite had gained 1.2% to 16,349.

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The main indexes finished last week with gains ranging from 0.6% to 1.4% after Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said more rate hikes are "unlikely" and the April jobs report pointed to easing wage pressures.

Today's economic news was fairly light, with speeches from a pair of central bank officials being the only events. Richmond Fed President Tom Barkin was one of those speakers.

Speaking at the Columbia Rotary Club in Columbia, South Carolina, Barkin expressed optimism that inflation will eventually come back down to the central bank's 2% target. For now though, the "recent data whiplash has only confirmed the value of the Fed being deliberate," he said.

Buffett & Co. cut Apple stake

While interest rates and inflation were a low hum on Wall Street today, the headlines coming from Saturday's annual Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B, +1.0%) shareholder meeting caused a loud stir.

Notably, the holding company cut its stake in Apple (AAPL) by 13%, to 790 million shares from 905 million at the end of 2023. However, as Warren Buffett, chairman and CEO of Berkshire explained, the move was made because of expectations that "current fiscal policies" are "likely" to cause corporate taxes to go up.

As for his take on the iPhone maker, Buffett said he still thinks Apple is a solid business and investment. AAPL shares fell 0.9% today.

Micron pops after being named a top pick

Outside of Omaha, single-stock news centered on Tyson Foods (TSN, -5.7%) and Spirit Airlines (SAVE, -9.7%), which both tumbled after earnings.

Meanwhile, Micron jumped 4.7% after Baird analyst Tristan Gerra upgraded the memory chipmaker to Outperform (Buy) and said it's a top pick among semis. The analyst sees "meaningful upside ahead" for MU, with "incrementally positive trends" unfolding in dynamic-random access memory (DRAM).

This created a halo effect for several large-cap semiconductor stocks, including Super Micro Computer (SMCI, +6.1%) and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD, +3.4%).

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With over a decade of experience writing about the stock market, Karee Venema is the senior investing editor at Kiplinger.com. She joined the publication in April 2021 after 10 years of working as an investing writer and columnist at a local investment research firm. In her previous role, Karee focused primarily on options trading, as well as technical, fundamental and sentiment analysis.