LONDON (Reuters) - World stocks rose on Friday, lifted by strong share price gains for tech giants such as Amazon and Facebook and growing hopes of a lasting peace on the Korean peninsula after a ground-breaking meeting of North and South Korean leaders.
European shares were set to end the week with a flourish too with a pan-European index set to post its fifth week of gains in a row, rivaling last September’s winning streak, with the tech sector strongly outperforming.
The latest gains are being partly spurred by forecast-beating first quarter earnings from two of the so-called FANG tech stocks — some of the world’s largest and most influential companies by market capitalization — which has boosted sentiment on the technology sector worldwide.
Amazon.com Inc shares jumped more than 6 percent in after-market trading while Facebook surged 9.1 percent on Thursday, calming worries about the fallout from its use of consumer data.
“Macro-economic data has been soft in a number of key economies, so it is reassuring that amidst those concerns we are still seeing strong earnings numbers coming through from big ticket corporates such as Amazon and Facebook,” said Investec economist Victoria Clarke.
“This is a good gauge of the broad drivers of sentiment particularly when there are those concerns about demand holding up in the face of weak economic data,” Clarke added.
European tech shares rose 0.75 percent to the highest in more than five weeks, buoyed also by gains in local IT and chipmaking firms such as Capgemini, ASML and Infineon.
In Britain, there was bad news on the growth front, with data showing the economy slowed
