US stocks traded on a high note late Sunday night as Wall Street attempted to sustain the momentum from the market's strong results last week.
Futures in the Dow Jones Industrial Average were up 222 points, as the S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100 futures also traded mostly in the green zone.
Wall Street has emerged off a robust climb after a shortened trading session to give way to the celebrations of the Fourth of July holiday. The Dow Jones Industrial and S&P 500 were up 3.4 percent and 4 percent respectively last week and the Nasdaq rallied 4.5 percent in that trade.
The coronavirus stock market rally eased into closing Thursday, but there was a good week for the main indexes. Tesla climbed on distribution figures for the second quarter, while Teladoc Health, Akamai Technologies, Taiwan Semiconductor and Atlassian all cleared purchase points. Regeneron Pharmaceuticals dropped on sluggish results at the bell for a possible treatment with coronavirus.
Over the long holiday weekend, developments in the crisis continued to march from bad to worse. New COVID-19 cases rose by records at some of the recent hotspots in the South and West - including the epicenters Florida and Texas on Saturday.
The World Health Organization said a record of 212,326 diagnoses of coronavirus were confirmed worldwide as of Saturday in 24 hours, with the US, Brazil, and India showing the largest increases. Data released by the Johns Hopkins University showed that over 45,000 new COVID-19 cases were confirmed across the US on Saturday.
According to Marc Chaikin, chief executive officer of Chaikin Analytics, "we're currently experiencing an increase in coronavirus cases, particularly in the sunbelt states that were in the vanguard of easing social distancing restrictions to facilitate the reopening of their economies," Fred Imbert of CNBC quoted him as saying.
Coronavirus cases in the US have breached the 2.98 million mark, with fatalities topping 132,000. New cases in the US reached a record of 57,232 on Thursday. Saturday and Sunday new cases were each pegged at around 45,000. Testing has continued to increase as well, exceeding 700,000 on Friday. Even then, the share of positive tests is climbing, especially in the South and West.
The recent resurgences in cases of the virus in some areas of the US led economists at Goldman Sachs to reduce their projections for US gross domestic product growth for 2020. This comes despite new economic figures, including the June employment data, come in well above estimates.
