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Wall Street ticks higher and adds to its record high

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NEW YORK (AP) -- Most stocks rose on Wall Street Monday to build on its all-time high reached last week.

The S&P 500 added 10.62 points, or 0.2%, to 4,850.43.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average topped 38,000 points after rising 138.01, or 0.4%, to 38,001.81.

The Nasdaq composite gained 49.32, or 0.3%, to 15,360.29.

Macy's climbed 3.6% after the retailer said it rejected a buyout offer from two investment companies, in part because it didn't offer "compelling value." SolarEdge Technologies rose 4% after it said it would cut 16% of its workforce, and NuStar Energy jumped 18.2% after Sunoco said it would buy the pipeline and storage company in a deal valued at $7.3 billion, including debt.

They helped offset a 24.2% drop for Archer Daniels Midland, which put its chief financial officer on leave. After getting a document request from U.S. regulators, it said it's investigating some of its accounting practices. ADM also said it expects to report profit for the full year of 2023 that's below what analysts were forecasting.

This upcoming week will have a rush of companies reporting their results for the last three months of 2023, with roughly 70 companies from the S&P 500 on the calendar. They include American Airlines, Intel, Procter & Gamble and Tesla.

Analysts are expecting companies in the S&P 500 to report an overall dip in earnings for the fourth quarter, down nearly 2% from a year earlier, according to FactSet. If they're right, it would be the fourth quarter in the last five where profits have fallen.

After the initial week of earnings reporting season, companies that have been topping analysts' forecasts for profits and revenue have been getting smaller bumps to their stock prices than usual, according to strategists at Bank of America.

Companies that fall short of expectations, meanwhile, have seen their stock prices get punished more than usual. It all points to "a higher bar after a big rally," Savita Subramanian and Ohsung Kwon wrote in a BofA Global Research report.

That big rally, which carried the S&P 500 to a record for the first time in two years, came largely on hopes that a cooldown in inflation will allow the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates several times this year. It would be a sharp turnaround from the last two years, when the Fed jacked its main interest rate drastically higher in hopes of slowing the economy enough to grind down high inflation.

Some stronger-than-expected reports on the economy recently have reinforced hopes that no recession is arriving, while also forcing traders to push out their forecasts for when the Fed will begin cutting rates. They overall see a less than 42% probability that it could begin in March, down from more than 80% a week ago, according to data from CME Group.

But the expectation is still for the Fed to cut rates more this year than the three times it's indicated.

Some upcoming reports on the economy could shift those expectations further.

Starting at /week.