Wall Street Close: Stocks firm up led by Amazon.com's Bernstein upgrade

Even as comments from Fed Chair Jerome Powell that the US economy has a long way to go before fully recovering and will need more support, US stocks on Wall Street rebounded on Tuesday.

The moves in stocks were led by a jump in Amazon.com, AMZN, despite a likely delay in the passage of new fiscal stimulus as well as concerns of a faster global economic recovery from the coronavirus pandemic.

Bernstein upgraded AMZN to "outperform," saying the company will continue to receive a boost from premium subscribers and third-party merchants even once the pandemic is contained.

This helped to lift competitor stocks such as Microsoft Corp MSFT, Apple Inc AAPL, Alphabet Inc GOOG and Facebook Inc FB.

These have been the kingpin of Wall Street, fuelling the rally since the coronavirus-driven crash in March.

Collectively on Tuesday, they rose between 0.3% and 2%= and provided some stability to an otherwise troubled market backdrop.

Consequently, 7 of the 11 major S&P 500 sector indexes were trading higher, battling against a three-week losing streak and the fears of a new round of lockdowns in Europe and the stalemate in Congress

Unofficially, the Dow Jones Industrial Average added 140.48 points, or 0.52%, to 27,288.18, the S&P 500 put on 34.4 points, or 1.05%, to 3,315.46, and the Nasdaq Composite added 180.56 points, or 1.68%, to 10,959.36.

Macro themes in play

Fed Chair Jerome Powell on Tuesday told a congressional panel that the economy had shown "marked improvement" since the pandemic drove it into recession, but the path ahead remains uncertain and the Fed will do more if needed.

Meanwhile Chicago Federal Reserve President Charles Evans clarified that there is potential to raise rates before the 2% inflation target is achieved.

Congress is yet to agree on another fiscal stimulus package.

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnston announced new lockdown restrictions, including closing bars at 10pm.

S&P 500 Index levels