S&P 500, Nasdaq end higher, notch weekly gains

STORY: U.S. stocks ended mostly higher on Friday, with the Dow the only outlier, dipping about three-tenths of a percent, while the S&P 500 gained about three-tenths of a percent and the Nasdaq climbed nine-tenths of a percent.Both the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq logged their sixth consecutive week of gains, their longest weekly winning stretches since October of 2024.It was a big week for corporate earnings, with five of the Magnificent Seven megacaps reporting.Among them, Apple climbed more than 3% on Friday, a day after the tech giant provided a solid sales forecast, touting strong demand for its flagship iPhone 17 and the MacBook Neo.Analysts now see overall first-quarter earnings growth of nearly 28% year-over-year, according to LSEG I/B/E/S Estimates.That's an 11.7 percentage point increase from where the estimate stood a week ago, and marks the biggest earnings growth since the fourth quarter of 2021.Melissa Brown is managing director of investment decision research at SimCorp."I think we're just seeing the continuation of this AI trade and maybe the complete ignoring of some of the other red flags that are out there - higher oil prices leading to higher inflation, you know, many other things that might give investors pause. But we're coming through a good earning season, particularly for some of these tech companies, and investors are, I guess, saying it's still time to buy there."Among other movers, shares of Atlassian surged more than 29% after the enterprise software firm hiked its forecast. Peers Salesforce and ServiceNow also gained.Shares of Reddit jumped 13% after the social media site gave an upbeat quarterly revenue forecast.On the flip side, shares of Roblox tumbled more than 18% after the online game platform cut its annual bookings forecast.