U.S. stock indexes opened higher on Thursday, with the S&P 500 (^GSPC) surpassing the 5,500 level for the first time in history, and Nvidia (NVDA) continuing its record surge and claiming the title of the world’s most valuable public company.
The S&P 500 rose 0.5% after closing at its 31st record high of the year on Tuesday, the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index (^IXIC) rose about 0.3% to a new intraday record, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI) added 0.2%.
After the holiday break on Wednesday, Wall Street was expected to continue winning in 2024. Stocks have rallied this year in large part on hopes for the potential of AI, and no company has captured more of the public’s attention than Nvidia, whose shares rose more than 3% in early trading. The company’s shares are up more than 170% so far this year.
On Tuesday, NVIDIA made a stunning surge to unseat Microsoft (MSFT) as the world’s most valuable company, just two weeks after it knocked Apple (AAPL) out of the No. 2 spot on the list of most valuable companies in the world. Yahoo Finance’s Jared Blikre writes that the company’s rise to the top has been so rapid that some more passive investors have had trouble keeping up.
Elsewhere on Thursday, attention shifted to global central banks after the Swiss National Bank cut interest rates for the second time this year, while the Bank of England kept its benchmark interest rate at a 16-year high but there were signs a rate cut was possible in the summer.
Meanwhile, in the US, most traders continue to expect the Fed to cut interest rates before September, according to the CME FedWatch tool. The biggest economic data was the weekly jobless claims figure, which fell by 5,000 to 238,000 last week, below the consensus forecast of 235,000.
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