us stocks advanced on wednesday afternoon buoyed by optimism about a resolution of the debtceiling debate in congress after president biden expressed confidence about achieving a bipartisan deal robust earnings from retailer target corp and a bounce in regional bank shares also provided a boost for three stock indexes on tuesday the dow industrials finished 33646 points or 01 lower at 3301214 and traded negative yeartodate for the first time since may 4 the sp 500 closed 2638 points lower or 06 to 410990 and the nasdaq composite lost 2216 points or 02 to 1234305 readnasdaq is leading the dow by the widest margin since 1991 as bluechip gauge erases 2023 gain is that a good sign stocks extended earlier gains on wednesday afternoon on optimism about a resolution of the us debtceiling debate in congress president joe biden sounded upbeat wednesday as a divided washington continued to work on achieving a bipartisan deal that raises the ceiling for federal borrowing and avoids a marketshaking default im confident that well get the agreement on the budget and america will not default biden said during a brief speech at the white house bidens remarks underscore earlier comments from house speaker kevin mccarthy who told cnbc in an interview earlier wednesday that he doesnt think the us will default on its debt see biden expresses confidence on achieving debtceiling deal america will not default james ragan director of wealth management research at da davidson said stocks could be vulnerable if we get to an impasse his team noticed that market participants started positioning more defensively due to the weakness in cyclical sectors including energy materials and financials which are leading the market lower this month but its hard to say if thats due entirely to the debt negotiations ragan said treasury secretary janet yellen has warned that june 1 could be the date when the us may become unable to pay its bills in the absence of a debtceiling increase concerns about potential impact on markets of a technical us default has helped keep the sp 500 index confined to a tight range between 3800 and 4200 in recent weeks theres still a lot of uncertainty and the debt ceiling is part of the issue and maybe limiting the upside of the market ragan told marketwatch in a phone interview but even we get through that our concern is what is it going to take to break the market out of that 4200 range peter cardillo chief market economist at spartan capital said in a note that the stock averages have not moved out of their trading ranges which suggests that the market is likely to trade sideways as the earnings season comes to an end and the focus shifts toward the june 1314 fomc federal open market committee meeting regional bank stocks were rising wednesday with western alliance bancorp wal up 134 after the lender said its deposits grew by 2 billion in the second quarter in us economic data construction on new homes rose 22 in april as us homebuilders continue to see strong demand from buyers housing starts rose to a 14 million annual pace last month from 137 million in march the government said wednesday meaning thats how many houses would be built over an entire year if construction took place at the same rate in every month as it did in april the data roughly matched economists expectations on wall street this content was created by marketwatch which is operated by dow jones  co marketwatch is published independently from dow jones newswires and the wall street journal