It’s a technology-heavy week for earnings. After the closing bell, investors will get results from technology giant Cisco Systems as well as payments behemoth PayPal.

Meanwhile shares of Amazon rose just 0.4 per cent, despite the company reporting a huge rise in quarterly profits. Amazon also said its founder and CEO Jeff Bezos would be stepping down as CEO to focus on broader work at the company.

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With Democrats and Republicans remaining far apart on support for President Joe Biden’s $US1.9 trillion ($2.5 trillion) stimulus package, investors are betting that the administration will opt for a reconciliation process to get the legislation through Congress.

GameStop and other recently high-flying stocks were up modestly. GameStop rose 4.2 per cent and AMC added 7.7 per cent. The stocks have been caught up in a speculative frenzy by traders in online forums and on social media who seek to inflict damage on Wall Street hedge funds that have bet these stocks would fall.

GameStop plunged 60 per cent to $US90 a share on Tuesday, and AMC Entertainment lost 41.2 per cent to $US7.82. Both companies have been in the spotlight for more than two weeks as investors pushed the stocks to astronomical levels.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has called for a meeting with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Federal Reserve Board and others to discuss the recent volatility in markets.

GameStop, whose shares have traded mostly on investor opinion instead of actual company news, announced it was hiring Matt Francis, formerly an engineering leader with Amazon Web Services, to the newly created role of chief technology officer.

Investors also had some economic reports to work through. A gauge of the service sector, where most Americans work, came in at its highest level in almost two years last month. The measure published by the Institute for Supply Management climbed to 58.7 per cent in January, up a full percentage point from the previous month.

Meanwhile a report on private sector hiring by payroll data company ADP showed employers hired 174,000 workers in January, which was much better than economists expected.

Energy companies rose as the price of crude oil jumped 2 per cent. Exxon Mobil rose 3.9 per cent and Schlumberger gained 7.1 per cent.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury rose to 1.12 per cent from 1.09 per cent late on Tuesday.

AP