Tech stocks surged on Friday as Wall Street cheered the blowout quarterly reports from three of the world's biggest tech companies.
The PowerShares QQQ Trust exchange-traded fund, which tracks the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100, rose 1.7 percent in the premarket.
Leading the ETF higher were shares of Amazon, Microsoft and Google-parent Alphabet; their stocks rose 8.7 percent, 7 percent and 4.5 percent, respectively.
E-commerce giant Amazon reported earnings per share of 52 cents a share, way ahead of a Thomson Reuters estimate of 3 cents a share. Amazon Web Services, the company's cloud business, was its main driver for growth, with sales leaping 42 percent on a year-over-year basis.
Amazon also received a boost in sales from Whole Foods, which it acquired in late August.
"We would characterize last night's Amazon September results as a 'Picasso-like quarter' with the company handily beating all metrics across the board," Daniel Ives, head of technology research at GBH Insights, said in a note Friday. "Last night's quarter ... is another feather in Bezos' cap."
Microsoft, meanwhile, beat Wall Street earnings expectations by 12 cents a share as its commercial cloud business topped $20 billion in annualized revenue for its fiscal first quarter.
Google-parent Alphabet reported adjusted earnings per share of $9.57, well above a Thomson Reuters estimate of $8.33 a share, as the company saw a higher-than-expected surge in the volume of clicks on Google ads across the world, especially in Asia.
Tech was poised to be the best-performing sector on Friday, with the Technology Select Sector SPDR ETF popping 1.6 percent before the bell.
Information technology has handily outperformed the broader U.S. stock market this year. The sector is up about 30 percent in 2017, while the S&P 500 has gained approximately 15 percent.
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