By Yasin Ebrahim

Investing.com — The S&P 500 rallied Friday to post its best week since November, led by tech as the broader market shrugged off Federal Reserve officials calling on the central bank to get even more aggressive on rate hikes that many fear could slow the economy too much.

It rose 1.1% while the Gained 0.8% or 273 Points, it rose 2.1%.

Tech made a comeback and managed to end a 2-week losing streak. As investors continue to invest in tech, it continued.

Meta Platforms (NASDAQ) was the leader of the pack, rising more than 44%. Apple Inc (NASDAQ) rose more than 22%. Alphabet and Microsoft were each up over 1%.

Also, chip stocks are on the rise. This was supported by an Nvidia (NASDAQ) gain of more than 6.6% as Nvidia extended their rally for a forth day.

Even though Fed officials wanted the central bank do more, falling interest rates have helped tech and other growth markets.

Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller called Friday on the Fed for more aggressive rate increases and balance sheet reductions to slow down inflation.

The remarks arrived on the heels of remarks from St. Louis Fed President James Bullard, who suggested the Fed hike rates by 50 basis points several times this year to push the central bank’s benchmark rate to 3% by year end.

That would be well above the Fed’s current outlook for rates to reach about 1.9% by year end.

It was hard for the industrials to get involved in the wider market rally, which was prompted by weakness of defense stocks and a slump at FedEx.

FedEx (NYSE 🙂 plunged 4% in the fourth quarter after reporting quarterly results which missed both top and bottom line due to higher labor costs.

Huntington Ingalls Industries (NYSE 🙂 and L3Harris Technologies Inc. (NYSE 🙂 were among the defense stocks that ended in red, as investors seemed to price in prospects of peace negotiations between Ukraine-Russia. This could be a key factor in ending the war.

Bloomberg reported that President Joe Biden warned Chinese President Xi Jinping about the “consequences” of supporting Russia’s invasion in Ukraine. 

GameStop (NYSE 🙂 closed the day 3.3% higher, despite reporting a surprising fourth quarter loss.

The stocks were likely to experience volatile ending to the week because of triple witching. When stock options, index futures and option contracts all expire at once, it usually triggers wild movements as investors leave old positions in order to move into newer ones.

A rally in the broad market has ignited debate over whether it is the beginning of a bottoming or the possibility that there will be further downturns.

However, market technicians caution against reading too much into this rally, as expiry of options tends to blur the markets movements. The market has yet to establish a bottom, but technical indicators such as volume and market breadth are not showing significant improvement.

“If this is the beginning of something more broad based, you’d want market breadth conditions to improve meaningfully … volume being strong as the price is going higher, but I think the jury’s still out on that,”  Chief Market Strategist David Keller at StockCharts told Investing.com in an interview on Friday.

“At at this point, I’m still thinking of it as a tradable bounce within a downtrend.” Keller added.