Stocks mostly edged higher on Monday, making a positive start to the week after the S&P 500 briefly entered into bear market territory on Friday, a symbolic marker of investors’ pessimism about the health of the economy. Although a late rally pulled the index higher, it closed the week with its seventh consecutive decline, the longest losing streak since the dot-com crash.
Future contacts in the United States indicated that the S&P 500 was set to rise more than 1 percent when markets open on Monday. The Nasdaq composite was set to gain 0.6 percent.
Shares of the software company VMware rose 20 percent in premarket trading on reports that Broadcom, the semiconductor giant, was in talks to acquire the company.
European stock indexes were higher, with the Stoxx Europe 600 up 0.8 percent on Monday. The euro gained nearly 1 percent versus the dollar, after Christine Lagarde, the president of the European Central Bank, wrote in a blog post that high inflation could lead the central bank to raise interest rates at its July meeting.
Asian markets were mixed, with Hong Kong’s Hang Seng down 1.2 percent, China’s CSI 300 down 0.6 percent and Japan’s Nikkei 225 up 1 percent.
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