Tesla, IBM and Meta Platforms helped lead most U.S. stocks higher on Thursday following a rush of profit reports from some of the country’s most influential companies. The S&P 500 rose 0.5%, as four out of every five stocks in the index climbed.

Palantir Technologies ( PLTR -4.48%) was one of the hottest artificial intelligence stocks on the market last year. Its 340% return in 2024 made it the single best-performing member of the S&P 500 ( ^GSPC -1.46%). However, Dan Ives at Wedbush Securities sees the stock moving even higher. And he recently gave shareholders two reasons to be thrilled:

Wall Street's main indexes rose on Thursday, driven by post-earnings advances in Meta and Tesla, although Microsoft's weak cloud forecast and downbeat results from Cigna dampened investor enthusiasm. Microsoft MSFT.O dropped 4.7% after forecasting disappointing growth in its cloud computing business.