NEW YORK, May 8, 2026, 17:03 EDT
- The S&P 500 and Nasdaq closed at records after a chip-stock surge and stronger U.S. hiring data.
- April nonfarm payrolls rose by 115,000, above forecasts, while unemployment held at 4.3%.
- Oil and Iran-war risks stayed in the frame, and market breadth was weaker than the headline indexes showed.
U.S. stocks rose to record closes on Friday, with the S&P 500 and Nasdaq lifted by gains in Nvidia, Micron Technology and Sandisk after a jobs report eased concern that the labor market was rolling over. The S&P 500 gained 0.84% to 7,398.93, the Nasdaq added 1.71% to 26,247.08 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average edged up 0.02% to 49,609.16.
The move matters because investors pushed equities higher even as the Iran war kept pressure on energy markets and the Federal Reserve remained in no hurry to cut interest rates. Bloomberg reported that the S&P 500 was headed for a sixth straight weekly gain, helped by a recovery in artificial-intelligence shares and a view that the U.S. economy could keep growing through the shock.
The Labor Department said nonfarm payrolls — jobs outside farms and a few other categories — rose by 115,000 in April, while the unemployment rate stayed at 4.3%. Health care, transportation and warehousing, and retail trade added jobs; federal government employment kept falling.
Nvidia rose 1.8%, while Micron and Sandisk jumped more than 15% each as demand tied to the buildout of AI data centers supported memory and storage shares. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index, a gauge of major chip stocks, rose sharply, taking its second-quarter gain to 55%.
“This is an economy that seems hard to wreck,” Rob Williams, chief investment strategist at Sage Advisory Services, told Reuters, pointing to productivity, spending, consumer wealth and earnings. That was the market’s working script on Friday: not a boom, but enough growth to keep risk appetite alive. Investing.com Australia
Corporate profits gave the rally another leg. LSEG I/B/E/S data showed first-quarter S&P 500 earnings were on track to rise almost 29% from a year earlier, with AI-linked heavyweights doing much of the work; 83% of the 440 S&P 500 companies that had reported beat analysts’ profit estimates, above the long-run average of about 67%.
Analysts were careful not to call the jobs report hot. Robert Pavlik, senior portfolio manager at Dakota Wealth, said the 115,000 gain was not “a tremendous amount,” but enough to reassure investors that the economy was not collapsing. Peter Cardillo, chief market economist at Spartan Capital Securities, called it “a solid labor report” and said it left the Fed focused on inflation rather than jobs. Reuters
There were weak spots under the index records. Declining stocks outnumbered advancers inside the S&P 500 by a 1.4-to-1 ratio, while Cloudflare slid after saying it would cut about 20% of its workforce and Expedia fell after warning that the Middle East conflict was weighing on demand.
The risk is that oil and geopolitics catch up with the trade. Brent crude settled at $101.29 a barrel after fresh fire around the Strait of Hormuz, still well above levels before the war, and the 10-year Treasury yield fell to 4.36% as investors also weighed soft consumer sentiment.
Chris Zaccarelli at Northlight Asset Management told Bloomberg that the economy looked stronger than the “doom crew” had argued, while Mark Hackett at Nationwide said bears still pointed to narrow leadership in areas such as semiconductors. For now, Hackett said, earnings revisions and price momentum were still driving markets higher. SWI swissinfo.ch
For the week, the S&P 500 rose 2.3% and the Nasdaq gained 4.5%, according to AP. That leaves Wall Street leaning on a familiar mix: AI spending, earnings beats and a labor market that is cooling slowly, not cracking.
