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S&P 500, Nasdaq end higher, notch weekly gains<body><p>STORY: U.S. stocks ended mostly higher on Friday, with the Dow the only outlier, dipping about three-tenths of a percent, while the S&P 500 gained about three-tenths of a percent and the Nasdaq climbed nine-tenths of a percent.</p><p>Both the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq logged their sixth consecutive week of gains, their longest weekly winning stretches since October of 2024.</p><p>It was a big week for corporate earnings, with five of the Magnificent Seven megacaps reporting.</p><p>Among them, Apple climbed more than 3% on Friday, a day after the tech giant provided a solid sales forecast, touting strong demand for its flagship iPhone 17 and the MacBook Neo.</p><p>Analysts now see overall first-quarter earnings growth of nearly 28% year-over-year, according to LSEG I/B/E/S Estimates.</p><p>That's an 11.7 percentage point increase from where the estimate stood a week ago, and marks the biggest earnings growth since the fourth quarter of 2021.</p><p>Melissa Brown is managing director of investment decision research at SimCorp.</p><p>"I think we're just seeing the continuation of this AI trade and maybe the complete ignoring of some of the other red flags that are out there - higher oil prices leading to higher inflation, you know, many other things that might give investors pause. But we're coming through a good earning season, particularly for some of these tech companies, and investors are, I guess, saying it's still time to buy there."</p><p>Among other movers, shares of Atlassian surged more than 29% after the enterprise software firm hiked its forecast. Peers Salesforce and ServiceNow also gained.</p><p>Shares of Reddit jumped 13% after the social media site gave an upbeat quarterly revenue forecast.</p><p>On the flip side, shares of Roblox tumbled more than 18% after the online game platform cut its annual bookings forecast. </p></body>
