After series of record highs, Wall Street ends 2023 with a bang

Wall Street hit record high after record high in 2023, a year investors had feared would be a washout as elevated interest rates threatened to grind the economy to a halt, media reports said.

However, a resilient job market, robust consumer spending and easing inflation kept investor confidence high — helping propel all three indexes to double-digit gains.

S&P 500, the broadest measure of the US stock market closed 0.28 per cent lower on Friday, 29 December, leaving it just under 30 points away from a record-high close. It gained 24 per cent this year, ending 2023 with a bang. It also notched its ninth-straight weekly gain — the longest streak since January 2004. This year has been much kinder to the market than last: The benchmark index fell by about 20 per cent in 2022, CNN reported.

Dow Jones Industrial Average reached multiple record highs in December, including notching records in each of the past five trading sessions. It was down 0.05 per cent Friday, closing at 37,689. In 2023, the Dow gained 14 per cent.

The tech-heavy Nasdaq index was the year’s biggest star, however. Although it was down 0.56 per cent Friday, closing at around 4769, it rose by 43 per cent in 2023 — its best performance since 2020. It remains about 1,000 points below the all-time high it reached in November 2021, demonstrating what a horrendous year tech had in 2022 — and how much room it still has left to recover, CNN reported.

It’s been a strong year for supersized tech and AI stocks.

Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta Platforms and Tesla, known collectively as the ‘Magnificent 7,’ dominated the S&P 500 and soared well over 100% in 2023, CNN reported.

Nvidia gained 246 per cent, Meta gained 184 per cent and Tesla soared 130 per cent. Each of those stocks slumped by more than 50 per cent in 2022.