Dow gains 300 points, S&P 500 up 1% after Trump says Syria attack may not be imminent

Stocks rose sharply on Thursday after President Donald Trump clarified his position on a possible missile attack in Syria, while the latest earnings season kicked off.

The Dow Jones industrial average gained 300 points, with IBM leading the index higher. The S&P 500 rose 0.7 percent as financials gained 1.3 percent. The Nasdaq composite advanced 0.8 percent.

Tech stocks helped the indexes rise, as Amazon, Apple and Netflix all traded higher. Banks shares gained as well, with J.P. Morgan Chase, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs all climbing more than 1.5 percent.

In a tweet, Trump said: "Never said when an attack on Syria would take place. Could be very soon or not so soon at all! In any event, the United States, under my Administration, has done a great job of ridding the region of ISIS. Where is our 'Thank you America?'"

"That's giving a boost to stocks, but the market is still gripped with uncertainty," said Peter Cardillo, chief market economist at Spartan Capital Securities. "Until that's gone, the market will stay in this volatile range."

Crude and gold futures retreated slightly following Trump's tweet.

The moves Thursday comes after a down session for Wall Street on Wednesday. The Dow dropped more than 200 points after Trump taunted Russia with the threat of imminent military action in Syria.

Trump appeared to criticize the Kremlin, for the country's support of Syrian President Bashar Assad, after a suspected chemical attack occurred in Syria over the weekend.

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Stocks rebounded Thursday as the latest corporate earnings season began. Before the bell, BlackRock posted earnings per share and revenue that surpassed analyst expectations. The asset manager's stock rose 1.7 percent.

Delta Air Lines reported quarterly earnings that beat estimates, despite rising costs. The company's stock rose 2 percent before the bell.

Citigroup, J.P. Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo are among the companies scheduled to report Friday morning.

Investors have high expectations for this earnings season. According to FactSet, S&P 500 earnings are forecast to have grown by 17.1 percent last quarter. That would be the biggest quarterly earnings growth since the first quarter of 2011, when they rose 19.5 percent.

Dubravko Lakos-Bujas, head of U.S. equity strategy at J.P. Morgan, said in a note Thursday that earnings growth for the quarter could surpass expectations.

"In our view, there is still room for estimates to move higher given second order tax reform benefits are difficult to model (i.e., the impact of dynamic scoring, rising disposable income, lower utility bills, higher business investment, etc) and more likely to be reported than projected in advance by the Street and corporates," Lakos-Bujas said.

In economic news, weekly jobless claims fell by 9,000 last week to 233,000. Import prices, meanwhile, remained unchanged in March.