Dow surges more than 400 points to retake 50,000 level as Cisco shares jump: Live updates

Shares of Cisco surged 14% after the software giant posted third-quarter results and guidance that beat Wall Street’s expectations and announced it would be cutting almost 4,000 jobs.

Cisco’s gain gave the Dow a boost, sending it to 50,000 during the session. The Dow also got a lift from Nvidia also advanced more than 4% after Reuters reported that the U.S. has cleared about 10 Chinese firms to purchase Nvidia’s H200 chip, though no deliveries have been made yet.

Cisco and Nvidia, as well as Amazon, have supported the Dow’s comeback — Cisco has soared 48% in the past two months, while Amazon and Nvidia has gained 28% and 30%, respectively. The run-up for the index comes even as the conflict in the Middle East persists, keeping inflationary fears among investors heightened as oil prices remain elevated.

Iran was a major topic of discussion during the summit between President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping Thursday, with the two sides agreeing that the Strait of Hormuz must remain open, per a White House official.

In the prior trading day, both the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq Composite notched new intraday and closing records, even as investors mulled over another hotter-than-expected inflation report.

While anxieties surrounding higher energy prices continued to weigh on other sectors of the market, technology stocks — particularly semiconductor names like Nvidia and Micron Technology — drove the market rally on Wednesday.

Going forward, investor Peter Mallouk believes that chipmakers may have even more upside from here.

“This has been, for the most part, a tech-driven long, long, long bull market … This growth is because of expected earnings. It’s not really a speculative bubble,” the Creative Planning CEO said on CNBC’s “Power Lunch” on Wednesday afternoon. “I think the chipmakers are actually undervalued as a group, because that’s a mega trend … It seems like we’ve got so much demand ahead of the supply trying to meet it that it’s got a lot of room to run.”