S&P 500 closes at new all-time high of 7,019 as Tesla stock stages outstanding comeback

The S&P 500 closed at a new record on Wednesday as traders kept buying stocks on hopes that the U.S. and Iran may still get to a deal and bring this war closer to an end.

The S&P 500 rose 0.80% and finished at 7,022.95. The Nasdaq Composite also hit a new record after climbing 1.59% to 24,016.02. The Dow Jones Industrial Average did not follow them higher. It fell 72.27 points, or 0.15%, and ended the day at 48,463.72.

The Nasdaq has now risen for 11 straight sessions. The S&P 500 has closed higher in 10 of the last 11 trading days.

This week alone, the S&P 500 is up 3% after wiping out all of its Iran war losses by Monday. The Nasdaq has added nearly 5% this week, while the Dow is up more than 1%.

Traders push the S&P 500 and Nasdaq to records as the rally gets faster

The speed of this rally is now one of the main stories. On Wednesday, the Nasdaq Composite pushed into overbought territory after its relative strength index, or RSI, climbed above 70. That happened just 11 trading days after the index had closed in oversold territory on March 30.

RSI is a common technical signal that tracks how quickly prices have risen or fallen, in which a reading below 30 usually means a market looks oversold, and a reading above 70 usually means it looks overbought.

In this case, the jump from below 30 to above 70 took only 11 sessions, which makes it the fastest such swing in data going back to the early 1980s.

The rally has also lined up with an 11-day winning streak for the Nasdaq, its first streak that long since November 2021. Over that run, the index has gained 15%. That is its best 15-day stretch since March 2022. Traders have been piling back into risk as bets grow that the fighting tied to Iran may not last as long as feared.

Software names also came roaring back. The iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF rose more than 3% on Wednesday and is now up almost 10% for the week. That rebound came right after the ETF fell more than 7% last week. The earlier drop came as traders worried that Anthropic’s Claude Mythos could hit the software-as-a-service business hard. This week, that fear eased enough for buyers to return.

Among Dow stocks, Microsoft was up nearly 4% in midday trading and Salesforce gained about 3%. For the week, Microsoft is now up 10% and Salesforce is up close to 7%. Inside the S&P 500, Datadog rose 7% and ServiceNow gained 6% on Wednesday. Both stocks are up more than 12% this week.

Tesla climbs as chip progress, factory plans, and software changes lift the stock

Tesla was one of the loudest names stock closed nearly 8% higher at $391.95 after chief executive Elon Musk said the company’s upcoming AI5 chip had reached an important engineering target and was getting closer to production.

Tesla is also planning two advanced chip factories in Austin, Texas, with SpaceX, one site is meant to build chips for vehicles and robots, while the other is meant to produce chips for orbital data centers. Intel has also joined the Tesla-SpaceX Terafab project.

On Tuesday, UBS changed its rating on Tesla from sell to hold and raised its price target to $352, about a dollar above its earlier target. The stock had already gained a little more than 3% on Tuesday, and it is now up more than 12% this week.

In the note, analyst Joseph Spak and his team said work on a smaller SUV was a welcome development because Tesla’s current light-duty vehicle lineup is too limited, with that lineup now including the Model 3 sedan, the Model Y SUV, and the steel-bodied Cybertruck.

The company has stopped selling the Model S and Model X while part of its Fremont, California factory moves toward production work tied to the Optimus humanoid robot.

The stock also got support from Tesla’s spring software update. The update made it easier for drivers to subscribe to Full Self Driving (Supervised) and check touchscreen data showing how often they use it.