NEW YORK—Stocks rallied Friday to close out a winning March and first quarter of the year, feats that looked questionable just a couple weeks ago when Wall Street was tumbling in turmoil.
The S&P 500 rose 1.4 percent to cap a 3.5 percent gain for the month. It also locked in a second winning quarter in a row after falling sharply most of last year on worries about high interest rates meant to get inflation under control.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 415 points, or 1.3 percent, while the Nasdaq composite climbed 1.7 percent. For the Nasdaq, big leaps for technology stocks drove a gain of 16.8 percent for the quarter, its best since the surge out of the coronavirus-caused crash in the spring of 2020….