Indexes kept moving up on Monday, adding to their record-setting advance on Friday and sending the S&P 500 to another new high. Progress on the trade front also helped to push the manufacturing sector higher, and that led the Dow Jones Industrial Average to gains of more than 250 points. Market participants were pleased to see stocks hold on to their positive momentum from last week, and more good news from some leading companies helped to keep investors happy. Cemex (CX -0.35%), iQiyi (IQ -1.89%), and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD 0.10%) were among the best performers on the day. Here's why they did so well.
Cemex gains on favorable U.S.-Mexico relations
Shares of Cemex picked up 5% as investors in the Mexican cement giant responded positively to news that the U.S. and Mexico had made substantial progress in negotiating a bilateral trade agreement. From the White House perspective, the new preliminary agreement is intended to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement, which the president has said was a bad deal for U.S. interests. For Cemex, which does business on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border as well as in more than 50 countries globally, a booming U.S. economy has the potential to help lift its stock price. Shareholders now hope that if trade tensions subside, it will mean even more business for Cemex in the future.
Image source: Cemex.
iQiyi makes another partnership
iQiyi stock rose almost 9% after the company announced that it would work with Chinese online travel company Ctrip.com International (TCOM -3.38%) to offer benefits to premium members. The China-based streaming-video specialist said that its top-ranked V7 VIP members will now automatically get all of the exclusive privileges that Ctrip Prime members get, including discounts on hotels, admission to high-demand attractions, priority for purchasing train tickets, and access to airport VIP lounges and fast-track security checkpoints. With membership counts at iQiyi already having jumped by 75% over the past 12 months, the company is pulling out all the stops to accelerate growth as quickly as possible.
AMD unveils a new server card
Finally, shares of Advanced Micro Devices gained 5%. The semiconductor chipmaker has moved forward impressively on multiple fronts, and in its latest announcement, AMD revealed a Radeon server card that's customized for use in data centers using virtualized graphics for high-density applications. The Radeon Pro V340 can deploy a gigabyte of memory to each of 32 different virtual machines, and security features make the card especially valuable for defense of cloud-based data. Investors hope that when the cards start shipping in the fourth quarter, they'll have an even bigger positive impact on AMD's results than some of the other initiatives that the company has implemented have produced.
