The U.S. stock market ended a bumpy week with a bang: the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 50,000 for the first time.
The Dow crossed the threshold — an important psychological barrier — earlier Friday before retreating and then surging again to close at 50,115.67.
That was a jump of 2.47 percent, more than 1,200 points for the day.
The rally extended to the S&P 500 and the tech-heavy Nasdaq, which saw jumps of 1.97 percent and 2.18 percent.
The stock market rally appeared to stretch across several sectors, including financial, health care and technology stocks.
Computer chip companies jumped, as Nvidia surged nearly 8 percent to ease losses from earlier in the week. AMD and Broadcom, too, jumped sharply, lifting the major indexes.
Concerns about AI and its potential impact on business appeared to be softening after landing hard earlier in the week.
But not all companies were helped by Friday’s rally.
Amazon saw its share price fall about 5.5 percent to 210.32 a share, after announcing it planned to spend about $200 billion investing in new technology such as AI and robotics. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
The stock of Stellantis, the automaker behind such brands as Chrysler and Jeep, plummeted nearly 24 percent to 7.27 a share, after revealing plans for a $26 billion business overhaul caused by the slow adoption of electric vehicles.
A measure of consumer sentiment also moved slightly higher this month.
On Friday, the University of Michigan’s sentiment index reported a better-than-expected but still gloomy preliminary outlook for February.
The index stood at its highest point since August 2025, yet “the overall level of sentiment remains very low from a historical perspective,” surveys of consumers director Joanna Hsu said in a note.
Hsu said consumers with the largest stock portfolios were the most optimistic, while the sentiment of consumers without stock investments remained “at dismal levels.”
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