By Adam Clark
Maybe the stock market just needed a long weekend to regain its confidence.
Stocks were gaining in premarket Monday with technology stocks prominent among the gainers. Semiconductor companies were particularly prominent as the artificial-intelligence trade took off again.
Western Digital was up 4.5%, Sandisk was up 3.9%, and Micron Technology rose 2.3% as memory-and-storage companies regained their momentum after a drop last week.
Tech-sector cheer was reinforced by Taiwan's Foxconn — formally named Hon Hai Precision Industry and the world's largest contract electronics maker — reporting a 40% increase in second-quarter revenue.
However, that wasn't massively helping two of Foxconn's biggest customers — chip maker Nvidia, which was up 0.3%, and Apple, which was down 1%. Investors still look more interested in recent highflyers than the largest of Big Tech companies.
Still, there were more pockets of tech optimism. SpaceX was rising 1.5% ahead of its addition to the Nasdaq 100 index on Tuesday. Cloud-computing-and-software company Oracle was rising 3.5% after getting some support from Wall Street analysts last week.
Write to Adam Clark at adam.clark@barrons.com
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