S&P soars to new record

The S&P 500 topped the 2,000 mark for the first time during trade on Monday but slipped back to finish just below the benchmark. The Wall Street stocks were broadly higher in confident buying during the session, bolstered by the US Federal Reserve’s caution over raising rates and a handful of new merger deals. The broad-market S&P 500 index gained 9.52 points (0.48 per cent) at 1,997.92. The intraday peak, a record, was 2,001.95. The narrower blue chip Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 75.65 points (0.44 per cent) to 17,076.87, while the tech-rich Nasdaq Composite added 18.80 (0.41 per cent) to 4,557.35, its highest level since the dot-com crash 14 years ago. Fresh takeover news also bolstered buying. Pharmaceutical company InterMune, with a treatment for the deadly lung affliction pulmonary fibrosis, surged 35.4 per cent to $72.85 after Swiss giant Roche announced a $74 a share buyout, worth $8.3 billion in total. Burger King and Canadian fast-food chain Tim Hortons confirmed reports that they were weighing a tie-up that would aim to move Burger King's headquarters from the United States to Canada to take advantage of lower corporate tax rates. Burger King shares gained 19.5 per cent while Tim Hortons, traded on the Toronto exchange, added 19.3 per cent. Also reported during trading hours, and confirmed after the market closed, was Amazon's nearly $1 billion purchase of videogame streaming website Twitch. Amazon added 0.7 per cent, while Google, which had earlier pursued Twitch, lost 0.4 per cent. Netflix finished up 0.4 per cent. Goldman Sachs rose 1.4 per cent after last Friday's late announcement of a deal with the Federal Housing Finance Agency to settle allegations it sold misrepresented mortgage bonds to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac ahead of the financial crisis. Goldman is buying back $3.15 billion of the bonds, with the penalty accruing to it estimated only at $1.2 billion, the difference between the market value of the bonds and what it is paying the FHFA. Bond prices were higher. The yield on the 10-year US Treasury fell to 2.38 percent from 2.40 per cent late on Friday, while the 30-year dropped to 3.13 per cent from 3.16 per cent. Bond prices and yields move inversely, according to AFP.