Markets notch small gains as tech stocks rise and Trump delivers mixed signals on tariffs

Stock markets rose slightly Friday on the back of gains in tech stocks like Alphabet and
Nvidia
as well as conflicting messages from President Donald Trump on tariffs. The S&P 500 was up 0.75%, the Dow Jones was flat, and the tech-heavy
Nasdaq
jumped 1.25%. The rise caps off a positive week for markets. The S&P 500 is up 5.6% from Monday morning.

On Thursday, Alphabet, the parent company of search giant
Google
,
beat
analysts’ predictions for its first quarter and grew its top line year over year in Q1 by 12% to $90.2 billion. From market close Thursday to Friday afternoon, its stock rose 1.5%. AI chipmaker Nvidia saw an even bigger jump of 4.3% after an executive
said
Thursday that the tech giant hasn’t seen a pullback in demand for its chips.

Meanwhile, in a wide-ranging interview with
Time
published on Friday, Trump promised potential relief to investors when he said he’s made “200 deals” on tariffs. He declined to say which countries and promised that initial negotiations would end in three to four weeks.

Conversely, in what could be a bearish signal for global markets, he stated that he would consider it a “total victory” if tariffs on foreign imports were anywhere between 20% and 50% in one year.

The small Friday surge in the stock market follows three days of positive jumps as markets look to regain their losses after Trump’s “
Liberation Day
.” On April 2, the president unveiled a base 10% tax on all countries’ exports and targeted China through a crescendo of tariffs, which
culminated
in a 145% tax on Chinese exports. Trump’s tariff plan prompted markets to tank amid investor fears of an all-out trade war.

Xi Jinping, the president of China, retaliated against the U.S. with reciprocal tariffs, and Trump has since
broadcast
that taxes against China will “come down substantially.” In his interview with

Time,

Trump said that he’s been in touch with Xi. Chinese officials, however, have repeatedly
denied
that they’ve been in negotiations with the Trump administration, though they have recently
exempted
some U.S. imports from their own retaliatory tariffs.

Markets have also closely tracked Trump’s comments on the Federal Reserve, the U.S. central bank. The president has repeatedly
criticized
Jerome Powell, chair of the Fed, for not cutting interest rates quickly enough. Trump’s criticisms reached a boiling point when he
suggested
last week that he had considered firing Powell, undercutting the Fed’s long-standing independence from the executive branch. The 47th president has since walked back his rhetoric and
said
he had “no intention” of firing the Fed chair.