Stock Market Update

[BRIEFING.COM] The S&P 500 (+0.5%), Nasdaq Composite (+0.9%), and DJIA (flat) are mostly higher shortly before midday amid solid tech leadership and widening strength in the broader market. 

The major averages opened flattish as the information technology sector (+1.5%) was the only sector to trade higher for a time. The top-weighted sector is still the day's top performer and contributes to the outperformance of the Nasdaq Composite. 

Investors are doing some bargain hunting across software names, which plummeted last week, with Oracle (ORCL 156.00, +13.18, +9.23%) and AppLovin (APP 461.49, +54.77, +13.47%) the best-performing S&P 500 components today. 

Strength across chipmakers such as NVIDIA (NVDA 191.80, +6.39, +3.45%) also boosts the PHLX Semiconductor Index (+1.5%). 

Gains are relatively modest elsewhere, though the materials sector (+0.9%) is nicely higher amid rising precious metals prices, and the communication services sector (+0.8%) benefits from its software components and solid mega-cap leadership from Alphabet (GOOG 326.20, +3.10, +0.96%) and Meta Platforms (META 670.48, +9.02, +1.36%). 

Meanwhile, the defensive consumer staples (-1.0%) and health care (-0.6%) sectors are lower, while the financials (-0.2%) and consumer discretionary (-0.2%) sectors hold more modest losses. Amazon (AMZN 209.52, -0.80, -0.38%) has shed nearly all of its early weakness that saw the stock trade nearly 3.0% lower this morning. 

Outside of the S&P 500, the Russell 2000 (+0.7%) and S&P Mid Cap 400 (+0.4%) are also off to a solid start this week.