Absent shocks, stocks rock ’n’ roll
Don’t look down. Wall Street’s three major stock indexes hit fresh all-time highs on Tuesday, buoyed by surprisingly strong housing sales and rosy predictions for the year ahead.
The Dow Jones industrial average rose 160.5 points to 23,590.83, leaving it up more than 19 percent since the start of the year.
The S&P 500 Index, a broader gauge of US companies, rose to 2,599.03, after briefly breaking 2,600 during early afternoon trading. The Nasdaq, an index of largely tech companies, rose 1 percent to 6,862.48.
Stocks rose on the back of positive economic news, that sales of existing homes rose 2 percent, which was stron- ger than economists had expected.
“It has been an eventful past couple months as the housing market has absorbed and bounced back from a string of deadly and destructive storms,” Svenja Gudell, chief economist at Zillow, said in a statement.
“Demand is high, inventory is low and nothing short of a dramatic shock — which nobody expects — seems likely to knock it off that track,” she added.
One of the biggest gainers was Apple, which rose 1.9 percent to $173.14, as retailers expect huge demand for the iPhone X for the Christmas shopping season, which begins Friday.
The days before Thanksgiving are typically a sleepy time for markets, since there is little new economic data that can move stocks one way or another.
However, it’s been a strong quarter for company earnings, with large corporations reporting stronger profits than a year ago.
The last two days of gains come in contrast to two weeks of modest losses in the stock market — one of the longest down streaks in a year that’s broken records for all-time highs.
In wackier market developments, bitcoin continued to surge past $8,000 on Tuesday, surpassing its extraordinary 700 percent gain so far this year.
The rise came as bitcoin investor Mike Novogratz, a former Fortress Investment Group trader, predicted the cryptocurrency would rise to about $10,000 by the end of the year.
“Bitcoin is built on an amazing technology, there’s a limited supply of it,” Novogratz said on Bloomberg TV.