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Stocks bounced Thursday, with tech shares helping lift the broader market more than 1 percent. The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index returned to positive territory for the year, after a turbulent session on Wednesday had erased all of 2018’s gains.
The recovery began in Europe, where major benchmarks were mostly higher after having recovered from an early fall. In the United States, stocks recovered from a 3 percent tumble the day before, helped by solid earnings results from Microsoft and Twitter.
The slide on Wednesday reflected worries among investors that a run of good news that had encouraged buying was coming to an end, replaced by concerns over rising interest rates and trade battles.
Technology stocks have been particularly hard hit in the recent selling, so a quarterly earnings report from Microsoft — which beat analysts’ expectations and the company’s own guidance across every segment of its business — helped on Thursday. Microsoft rose more than 4 percent in early trading.
And Twitter surged more than 14 percent after it reported another profit and revenue growth of over 29 percent from last year.
Still, it is a “very volatile environment,” with fears about trade wars and Italy’s budget battle with the European Union “conspiring to make investors nervous,” Peter Dixon, the global financial economist at Commerzbank, said before the start of trading in the United States.
In Asia, stocks ended the day mixed. The steepest losses were recorded in Japan, where stocks roughly mirrored drop in the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index in the United States on Wednesday.
Asian shares this year have been faster to reflect investor concerns about global economic health. China’s growth is slowing, which could slow activity across the region, if not the world. Concerns about the effect of President Trump’s mounting trade war with Beijing have also driven shares down, though the actual damage so far to the Chinese economy appears to be modest.
Investors have also soured on the region’s technology companies, particularly in China, where stock buyers had once driven internet giants like the Alibaba Group and Tencent Holdings to valuations on par with Silicon Valley giants like Facebook. On Thursday, Alibaba and Tencent were among the companies that saw their shares drop significantly.
In South Korea, investors reacted negatively to a forecast by SK Hynix, a big microchip maker, warning that prices for a type of chip known as flash memory would continue to fall into next year as a result of waning smartphone demand. Flash memory chips are used in smartphones and a number of mobile devices, and demand for those components is considered a rough proxy for the health of the technology hardware sector.