US stocks on Thursday set a record high and record highs, hitting a remarkable end, given the political turmoil that shook the world a day ago but failed to derail the stock market update. Dow Jones Industrial Average [: DJIA] closed at 0.7% to end with a stage of over 31,000, the S&P 500 SPX index,
closed 1.5% to a high of over 3,800 to close at around 3,804, while the Nasdaq COMP Composite Index,
ended well over 13,000, driven by a revival of the appetite for technology names, following a poor performance of the index on Wednesday after the Georgia Senate election. Nasdaq Composite closed up 2.6% to 13,067. Investors looked largely at Wednesday’s violent conflict between pro-Trump protesters and focused on better-than-expected reports of manufacturing, with the Institute for Supply Management’s services index rising, with an unexpected return of the index to 57, 2 in December, from 55.9. In addition, weekly unemployment complaints were almost constant last week, falling to 787,000 from 790,000 revised in the previous week. In corporate news, Tesla Inc. TSLA,
reached a record high, helping to make CEO Elon Musk the richest man in the world, surpassing AMZN on Amazon.com,
Jeff Bezos. Investors will closely monitor the jobs report on Friday to find clues to the health of the economy amid the COVID-19 pandemic.