Wall Street sign (Photo : Reuters)
The indexes for Standard & Poor's (S&P) 500 and Nasdaq stocks closed at record highs on Friday. It was fueled by a surge in Wall Street tech earnings.
S&P increased for the fifth day in a row, gaining 4.76 points to finish at 2117.69. Meanwhile, Nasdaq rose 36.02 points to end the day at 5092.08.
This was the first time both indexes closed at record highs since the 2000 dot-com bubble. Profit margins were extremely low then, due to high competition.
The industrial average of Dow Jones increased 21.45 points to 18,080.14. It is about 208 points short of its record close of 18,288.63 on March 2.
All three measures of the U.S. stock market are in the right direction for the year, after a recent drop. This year the Nasdaq has shot up 7.5 recent, while the S&P has risen 2.9 percent, and the Dow has increased 2.6 percent, according to USA Today.
Nasdaq's surge on Friday was driven party by Microsoft's impressive 10 percent rise. Meanwhile, Amazon stocks shot up after it announced details about its service for cloud computing.
Other companies also reported higher-than-expected averages. They included the titans Google and Starbucks.
The current Wall Street surge proves that stocks indeed increase in the long term. However, investors in the tech boom in 1999 likely did not expect to wait 15 years to see a profit.
The main lesson from the dot-com bubble is that investors should not focus on the economy's "shape," according to Barrons. Instead, they should also evaluate how companies are going to maximize the growth of their profits.
