Deal-making, vaccine hopes spark stock rally

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Deal-making and vaccine hopes gave investor sentiment a major shot in the arm on Monday, helping Wall Street claw back some of the big losses it suffered last week.

AstraZeneca restarted clinical trials in Britain for its COVID-19 vaccine but the U.S. study remains on hold, according to sources…and Pfizer proposed over the weekend expanding its pivotal late-stage trial to more people.

The Dow and S&P 500 rallied more than one percent, while the Nasdaq rose nearly 2 percent.

The biggest news of the day was the tie up between Oracle and TikTok. The two will partner in order to keep the popular short-form video app from going dark in the United States. President Trump tried to force a sale of TikTok's U.S. operations - citing concerns that the app's user data could be siphoned off by the Chinese government.

But this deal is a partnership -not a sale.

Plus - this deal doesn't get Oracle any closer to catching up with cloud leaders Amazon Web Services (AWS)- - - or Microsoft Azure, says Kim Forrest, chief investment officer at Bokeh Capital Markets. In her opinion, the partnership is weird.

"Oracle has tried to get grow its presence on the web in the cloud and I guess they are thinking that TikTok, being a video sort-of enterprise fits in well, but I still think it is a head-scratcher given their strong enterprise background. So I don't know how this really gets them into the world of AWS and Azure, because this is really consumer-oriented."

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin told CNBC the deal included a commitment to create a U.S. headquartered company with 20,000 new jobs. It is not clear if Trump will approve the deal and how the Chinese will respond.

Shares of Oracle surged more than 4 percent. Microsoft, which lost the bid, also rallied.

But that wasn't the only deal of the day. Chip maker Nvidia is snapping up Britain's Arm Holdings in a $40 billion deal that's likely to shake up the global tech world. Nvidia shares jumped nearly 6 percent.

And Gilead Sciences agreed to buy Immunomedics, a biopharmaceutical company, for $21 billion. With this deal Gilead gets access to a cancer treatment for an aggressive and tough-to-treat type of breast cancer recently approved by the FDA. Shares of both companies finished higher.