Stock market today: Wall Street pulls closer to records after retailers top profit forecasts

NEW YORK — U.S. stocks ticked higher Wednesday after more big companies delivered profit reports that topped analysts' expectations.

The S&P 500 rose 0.4% a day after breaking an eight-day winning streak, its longest of the year. The index is back to within 0.8% of its all-time high set last month.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 55 points, or 0.1%, while the Nasdaq composite gained 0.6%.

Treasury yields eased a bit in the bond market as investors wait for the week's main event, which will arrive Friday. That's when Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell will give a speech at an annual economic symposium. The hope is he'll offer clues about how deeply and quickly the Fed will begin cutting interest rates next month after it jacked them to a two-decade high to beat inflation.

In the meantime, more companies joined a parade to deliver what looks to be the best growth in profit for S&P 500 companies since late 2021.

Target jumped 11.2% after the retailer said an important underlying measure of sales strength for the spring came in at the high end of its expectations, as traffic increased at both its stores and online. Its profit topped analysts' estimates, and it raised its forecast for the full year.

TJX, the company behind TJ Maxx and Marshalls, rose 6.1% after it likewise reported stronger profit for the latest quarter than expected. The retailer also raised its profit forecast for the full year and said it saw increased customer transactions at all of its divisions.

Worries have been growing about whether U.S. shoppers can keep up their spending and keep the slowing economy out of a recession. Inflation is slowing, but prices are nevertheless much higher than before the pandemic, and many U.S. households have burned through the savings they built up during that stay-at-home period.

Concerns have been particularly high for U.S. households at the lower end of the income spectrum. High interest rates instituted by the Federal Reserve have made it more expensive to borrow money, compounding the difficulty.

That's why the widespread expectation is for the Fed next month to lower its main interest rate for the first time since the COVID crash of 2020. The only question is how much and how quickly it will move.

Most Federal Reserve officials agreed last month that they would likely cut at their next meeting in September, as long as inflation continued to cool, according to minutes of the meeting released Wednesday.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury has been sinking since April on such expectations. It eased a bit further Wednesday, down to 3.79% from 3.81% late Tuesday.

''We have long warned that the jobs numbers were unreliable and subject to dramatic revision,'' said Nancy Tengler, chief executive of Laffer Tengler Investments. She suggested focusing on the longer term and said rising U.S. worker productivity is an encouraging signal for the economy.

On Wall Street, coal companies Arch Resources and Consol Energy saw their stocks swing after they said they were combining in an all-stock ''merger of equals.'' After merging, they plan to go by a new name, Core Natural Resources.

Both their stocks initially jumped following the announcement but regressed as the day progressed. Arch Resources ended the day down 1.9%, while Consol Energy gained 0.9%.

All told, the S&P 500 rose 23.73 points to 5,620.85. The Dow gained 55.52 to 40,890.49, and the Nasdaq composite tacked on 102.05 to 17,918.99.

In stock markets abroad, indexes were mixed. Japan's Nikkei 225 slipped 0.3%. It was a much more modest move than some of its huge swings in recent weeks, including its worst day since the Black Monday crash of 1987.