U.S. stocks end mostly up as Dow and S&P 500 score fresh record highs

U.S. stocks closed mostly higher Friday, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 both eking out fresh record highs as megacap chip maker Nvidia Corp. extended its rally.

How stock indexes traded

The Dow Jones Industrial Average
DJIA
rose 62.42 points, or 0.2%, to close at 39,131.53.
The S&P 500
SPX
edged up 1.77 points, or less than 0.1%, to book an all-time closing high of 5088.80.
The Nasdaq Composite
COMP
fell 44.80 points, or 0.3%, to finish at 15,996.82.

For the week, the Dow gained 1.3%, the S&P 500 rose 1.7% and the technology-heavy Nasdaq Composite advanced 1.4%, FactSet data show.

What drove markets

U.S. stocks finished mostly higher Friday, with S&P 500 booking a weekly gain on the back of Nvidia Corp.’s
NVDA,
+0.08%
blowout earnings results after the closing bell on Wednesday.

The chip maker “lived up to the hype and then some,” Matt Stucky, chief equity portfolio manager at Northwestern Mutual Wealth Management Co., said about the company’s latest quarterly earnings results in a phone interview Friday.

There’s “insatiable demand” for Nvidia’s artificial-intelligence chips, Stucky said, and the recent surge in the megacap tech company’s stock price is “just a lift to the overall market.”

Shares of Nvidia ended with a 0.4% gain on Friday to a notch a record high, after surging 16.4% on Thursday as investors cheered the company’s quarterly earning results and guidance.

Read: Nvidia now worth $2 trillion, becoming only third U.S. company to hit that mark

On Thursday, the S&P 500 posted its biggest daily percentage increase since Jan. 6, while the Nasdaq logged its largest percentage gain since Feb. 2, according to Dow Jones Market Data.

Most of the S&P 500’s 11 sectors rose Friday, with only information technology, communication services, consumer discretionary and energy closing in the red, according to FactSet data.

Meanwhile, so-called Big Tech companies — which include Nvidia as well as Apple Inc.
AAPL,
-2.82%,
Microsoft Corp.
MSFT,
-2.01%,
Alphabet Inc.
GOOGL,
-0.91%

GOOG,
-0.93%,
Amazon.com Inc.
AMZN,
-1.14%,
Meta Platforms Inc.
META,
-0.86%
and Tesla Inc.
TSLA,
-2.58%
— mostly fell Friday, FactSet data show. Only Nvidia and Amazon finished the trading session higher in that group of seven megacap stocks.

Looking ahead, the U.S. economic calendar for next week includes an estimate of gross-domestic-product growth in the fourth quarter of 2023, and a reading on inflation in January from the personal-consumption expenditures price index.

So far, “the economy is really not slowing down all that much,” said Russell Price, chief economist at Ameriprise Financial, by phone Friday. “Overall, I think that the economy is doing fine. That’s good for corporate profits.”

Read: UBS raises 2024 forecast for S&P 500 after ‘surge in AI investment’