Stocks rallied on Wednesday as investors eyed the end of an eventful month and first quarter of the year marked by resiliency in the face of a bank crisis and looming questions about the global economy.

At the closing bell, the S&P 500 (^GSPC) was up 1.1%, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI) was higher by 1%, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC) led gains, rising 1.8%.

With the first quarter set to wrap up Friday, the Nasdaq is sitting on gains north of 13%, the S&P 500 is up more than 4.5% so far this year, and the Dow is lagging, falling 1.3% in 2023.

This relative performance is a reversal from what was seen last year, when the Nasdaq fell nearly 30%, the S&P 500 lost over 18%, and the Dow fell a more modest 9%.

The price of crude oil was volatile on Wednesday, trading below $73 after having changed hands north of $74 earlier in morning trade. The 10-year yield stood near 3.55%.

Bitcoin (BTC-USD) was also notably higher, rising more than 5% to trade north of $28,000.

So far this year, bitcoin has gained more than 70%.

Wednesday's move higher in the major averages came amid a somewhat slower calendar for corporate and economic news, with earnings last night from Micron Technology (MU) and Lululemon (LULU) serving as the key highlights during the trading session.

Micron shares were up more than 7% on Wednesday after the chip giant last night suggested the battered chip business could be turning a corner, with CEO Sanjay Mehrotra telling investors "we are close to a transition to sequential revenue growth in our quarterly results."

Micron reported revenues for its fiscal second quarter on Tuesday that were down about 10% from the prior quarter and more than 50% lower than the same period last year.

Mehrotra also called out the potential positive impacts that recent investor enthusiasm around AI advances could have on the industry, telling investors: "Recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) provide an exciting prelude to the transformational capabilities of large language models, or LLMs, such as ChatGPT, which require significant amounts of memory and storage to operate. We are only in the very early stages of the widespread deployment of these AI technologies and potential exponential growth in their commercial use cases."