MLNX Mellanox Technologies Ltd

By Will Horner 

U.S. stock indexes were mixed Monday as a steep fall in Boeing shares dragged the Dow Jones Industrial Average lower.

The blue-chip index shed 181 points, or 0.7%, to 25275. The S&P 500 added 0.4% and the Nasdaq Composite climbed 0.7%.

Shares of Boeing slumped 12% after China and Indonesia grounded all of their Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft following Sunday's deadly crash of an Ethiopian Airlines jet of the same type. The move erased about 300 points from the Dow, meaning that if shares of the aerospace company were flat, the Dow would have actually started the day higher.

Nvidia Corp. agreed to buy computer-networking supplier Mellanox Technologies Ltd. in an all-cash deal valued at roughly $7 billion. Nvidia's shares rose 0.2% while Mellanox's shares climbed 8.7%.

Commerzbank gained 5.9% after The Wall Street Journal reported over the weekend that top executives at the lender and at rival Deutsche Bank had agreed to informal talks on a possible merger.

Questions about the health of the world economy prompted stock declines Friday. A dramatic slide in Chinese exports and the lackluster U.S. jobs report led Wall Street to close out its worst week since December.

Meanwhile, hopes were lifted that a U.S.-China trade could soon be reached after Beijing's top central banker said Sunday that China had agreed not to devalue its currency to support its exporters.

The yuan's decline in 2018 had raised concerns in Washington that China was pushing down its value to offset U.S. tariffs on Chinese products, and had been a key sticking point for U.S. trade negotiators.

While the trade issue remained at the forefront of investors' concerns, Geoffrey Yu, head of the investment office at UBS Wealth Management, said some were beginning to see light at the end of the tunnel.

"It seems like the market is starting to move on from this, pricing in significant good news," he said. "We just need Trump to announce a summit, and a summit is virtual confirmation that something is in the pipeline and then we can move on."

U.S. consumers ramped up their spending in January, a sign of solid economic growth in the first quarter following a mixed jobs report Friday that raised fresh concerns about U.S. growth.

Exceptional factors such as the partial federal government shutdown meant the job numbers were an exception to what is a generally strong outlook, said Michael O'Sullivan, chief investment officer for international wealth management at Credit Suisse.

"Wages growth is pretty strong and our view is that the U.S. economy at the moment is pretty solid, pretty OK," he said.

Comments from Jerome Powell in a televised interview Sunday also offered investors some comfort. He said the U.S. economic outlook was favorable and doesn't require higher or lower interest rates for now.

In Europe, market participants were readying for a busy week of Brexit news. The British parliament is set to vote on Prime Minister Theresa May's Brexit deal on Tuesday, with expectations high that it will be rejected for a second time, and further votes on Wednesday and Thursday likely.

The WSJ Dollar Index, which tracks the U.S. currency against a basket of 16 peers, was broadly flat. The yield on 10-year Treasurys rose to 2.653%, from 2.627% Friday. Yields and prices move in opposite directions.

Brent crude, the global oil benchmark, rose 0.8% to $66.22 a barrel. Gold fell 0.2% to $1,295.30 a troy ounce.

Elsewhere, the Stoxx Europe 600 rose 0.3%. In Asia, China's indexes advanced following sharp declines at the end of last week. The Shenzhen A Share Index jumped 3.9% and Hong Kong's Hang Seng rose 1%.

--Jessica Menton contributed to this article.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 11, 2019 10:04 ET (14:04 GMT)

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