Topline
The S&P 500 surpassed 7,000 points as trading opened Wednesday, the latest milestone for the nearly 70-year-old index as big tech has boosted the market in recent years.
The index, tracking the largest American companies, is fueled by big tech’s skyrocketing growth.
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Key Facts
The S&P 500 briefly rose to 7,001 shortly after trading commenced on Wednesday, before gains pared back to just 0.2% below the 7,000-point threshold.
Broader gains were headlined by Intel, whose shares surged 9.4%, followed by Starbucks (4.9%), Nvidia (1.7%), Tesla (1.5%), Adobe (1.5%), Charter Communications (2.3%) and Texas Instruments (8.3%).
What To Watch For
The Dow Jones Industrial Average is approaching the 50,000-point milestone, just under two years after the index topped 40,000 for the first time in May 2024. The Dow increased by just 9 points to 49,168 as of Wednesday morning. It would be the latest 10,000-point milestone achieved by the index in recent years, following its previous milestones of 30,000 in November 2020 and 20,000 in January 2017. It took 103 years for the Dow to hit 10,000, reaching the milestone during the dot-com boom in 1999.
Key Background
Big tech has largely controlled the stock market since the early 2000s, and in recent years, four of the largest companies—Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft and Google parent Alphabet—have topped a $4 trillion market valuation. Nvidia, the world’s largest firm, has experienced a 227,000% growth surge since achieving a $2 billion market cap in 2000, following its valuation surpassing $5 trillion in October 2025. Even as tech has fueled the stock market, JPMorgan economists argue the U.S. economy has diverged from equity markets, however, and that indexes like the S&P 500 have outpaced the “real economy.” Analysts said that, while tech has contributed to a 350% earnings per share growth since 2000, the “average” U.S. company has grown just 47%. The equity market focuses on earnings, margins and buybacks, whereas the economy relies on wages, consumer spending and the job market, each of which has deteriorated over the last year, the analysts said.
Further Reading
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tylerroush/2026/01/28/sp-500-hits-7000-for-first-time-boosted-by-tech-stocks/
