U.S. stocks rose for a fourth day following a rally in Europe after Scotland rejected independence and as corporate takeovers boosted shares. Investors also watched the first day of trading of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.
Dresser-Rand Group Inc. rallied 13 percent as Siemens AG prepared to offer more than $6.5 billion for the company, according to people familiar with the plan. Concur Technologies Inc. jumped 18 percent as SAP SE agreed to buy the company for $7.4 billion to boost its cloud-computing business. Oracle Corp. slid 2.4 percent after Larry Ellison stepped down as chief executive officer.
The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index advanced 0.2 percent to 2,014.42 at 9:30 a.m. in New York. TheDow Jones Industrial Average added 35 points, or 0.2 percent, to 17,300.99.
“The Scottish ‘no’ vote gave some tailwind to the European markets, and we’re just trading in sympathy off of that to start the day,” Michael James, a Los Angeles-based managing director of equity trading at Wedbush Securities Inc., said in a phone interview.
Trading may be subject to unexpected swings today because of a quarterly event known as quadruple witching, when futures and options contracts on indexes and individual stocks expire.
S&P Dow Jones Indices is also scheduled to rebalance the S&P 500 in a quarterly move to adjust stock weightings. About $25 billion of shares in trades will be done as investors buy and sell to mimic the changes, according to a Sept. 7 estimate by Howard Silverblatt, an index analyst at the New York-based company.
Alibaba IPO
Alibaba, the e-commerce company started in 1999 with $60,000 cobbled together by Jack Ma, cemented its status as a symbol of China’s economic emergence by raising $21.8 billion in a U.S. initial public offering. The company and shareholders including Yahoo! Inc. sold 320.1 million shares for $68 each, according to a statement, after offering them for $66 to $68.
The sale, which values Alibaba at $167.6 billion, is already the largest by any company in the U.S., and has the potential to break the global record -- currently held by Agricultural Bank of China Ltd.’s $22 billion IPO in 2010 -- if underwriters issue more shares.
European shares rose, sending the Stoxx Europe 600 Index up 0.5 percent. Scotland’s First MinisterAlex Salmond conceded defeat after the anti-independence “No” camp garnered 55 percent of the votes.
A report at 10 a.m. in Washington may show that a gauge of the U.S. outlook for the next three to six months rose at a slower pace in August. The Conference Board’s index of leading indicators climbed 0.4 percent, following a 0.9 percent increase in July, according to the median forecast of economists in a Bloomberg survey.
To contact the reporters on this story: Joseph Ciolli in New York at jciolli@bloomberg.net; Lu Wang in New York at lwang8@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Lynn Thomasson at lthomasson@bloomberg.netJeremy Herron
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