Line IPO and BOE Stimulus Decision Behind Today's Rally
A fun tech IPO, some promising earnings results and a possible U.K. stimulus are likely behind the stock market rally.
On Thursday, Japanese social networking company Line (LN) - Get Report successfully priced its offering, which valued the company at about $9 billion. Line raised $1.3 billion on the New York Stock Exchange after pricing its shares at the high end of its range, the largest tech IPO of the year so far.
"Line is presenting some excitement-excitement is not something that we should dismiss," said Jim Cramer, TheStreet's founder and manager of the Action Alerts PLUS portfolio.
Line is also set to start trading in Tokyo on Friday. The company provides voice calls, messaging and games. Its 218 million monthly active users come mainly from Japan, Taiwan, Thailand and Indonesia.
Line shares are up 25.7% to $41.27 in afternoon trading on Thursday.
Also on Thursday, the Bank of England announced that it would hold interest rates steady but would consider economic stimulus in August.
"In the absence of a further worsening in the trade-off between supporting growth and returning inflation to target on a sustainable basis, most members of the committee expect monetary policy to be loosened in August," the minute meetings read. "The precise size and nature of any stimulatory measures" have yet to be determined.
The pound rose about 2% against the dollar, to $1.336, following the announcement. Only one member of the bank's nine-member Monetary Policy Committee voted for an immediate rate cut. The central bank will release its next policy decision on Aug. 4.
Other factors driving the rally include strong earnings this week from companies such as JPMorgan Chase (JPM) - Get Report , CSX (CSX) - Get Report and Alcoa (AA) - Get Report .
"If you're looking like I do for granularity in the bottoms up, then pretty much every one of these stocks had good news," Cramer said. "If you extrapolate from them, then you're probably afraid you're missing an even further move than we've had already."