Wall Street soars as investors scrutinize bank reports

July 19 (Reuters) – Wall Street’s major stock indexes rose on Wednesday after investors turned a blind eye to Goldman Sachs’ disappointing financial results, focusing on the solid gains of several smaller banks.

Goldman Sachs shares fell 1% as the banking group’s second-quarter earnings fell more than 60% as the Wall Street giant wrote off $504 million related to its GreenSky unit and investment banking suffered from a decline in deal volume.

Shares of major lenders rose on Tuesday after reports that rising interest rates helped boost earnings in the second quarter.

“We have dealt with many large companies before and they have shown good results so far. Maybe (Goldman) is the first problem,” said Dennis Dick of Triple D Trading.

Some other banks, such as Citizens Financial and M&T Bank, posted second-quarter profits that beat Wall Street forecasts, thanks to swift interest rate hikes by the US Federal Reserve.

Citizens Financial rose by 4.40% and M&T Bank by 2.84%.

The Dow Jones index increased by 0.52% to 35,131.95 points. at 17:40 Moscow time, the S&P 500 index rose 0.38% to 4,572.3 points and the Nasdaq gained 0.36% to 14,404.63 points.

Carvana jumped 28.74% after a struggling used-car salesman settled with most of its bondholders, reducing the company’s debt by more than $1 billion.

Tesla was up 1.80% ahead of its quarterly report, which will be released after the close of trading and will open the reporting season for heavyweights in the tech sector.

Credit Suisse raised its year-end target for the S&P 500’s main index to 4,700 from 4,050, citing reduced risk of a near-term US recession and improved earnings prospects for major tech companies.

Investors are also waiting for reports from Netflix and IBM.

Elevance Health rose 6.30% to top the S&P 500 after the health insurer forecast full-year earnings above Wall Street estimates.

According to all 106 economists surveyed by Reuters, the US Federal Reserve will raise its key rate by 25 basis points to the range of 5.25-5.50%, with most still believing the hike will be the last in the current monetary tightening cycle.

The original message in English is available at the code: (Bansari Mayur Kamdar and Johann M Cherian in Bangalore)