Stocks Rally, Dow Surpasses 13,000 for First Time
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
American stocks extended their biggest monthly rally in more than three years and the Dow Jones Industrial Average surpassed 13,000 for the first time, spurred by profits that topped analyst forecasts at Boeing Co. and Amazon.comInc.
Boeing rose to a record $94.69 after earnings surged 27%. Amazon jumped the most in five years after the online retailer raised its 2007 projections. More than two-thirds of 230 Standard & Poor’s 500 Index members have reported profits that topped forecasts.
“It’s a global spring fling,” the chief market strategist at D.A. Davidson & Co., which manages $17 billion in Great Falls, Montana, Frederic Dickson, said. “It’s really caught investors by surprise who had low earnings expectations.”
Alcoa Inc. had the Dow average’s top advance after saying it may sell some units. Energy stocks gained with the price of oil. Share prices were also lifted today by a Commerce Department report showing durable goods orders rose more than forecast in March, signaling business spending started to recover as the first quarter ended.
The Dow industrials added 135.95, or 1.1%, to 13,089.89, its highest close ever.
The S&P 500 increased 15.01, or 1%, to 1495.42, its highest since September 2000. Its 5.2% advance in April is the most for a month since October 2003. The Nasdaq Composite Index gained 23.35, or 0.9%, to 2547.89.
All but one of the 30 Dow industrial members rose yesterday. The benchmark reached the 13,000 milestone 128 trading days after breaching 12,000, about 15 times faster than the prior 1,000-point advance.
Profit reports from more than half of its members including Citigroup Inc. and Caterpillar Inc. this month reinforced expectations that the biggest American companies will weather slower economic growth.
The Dow record is “a barometer of the strength of U.S. corporate profits and, to a certain degree, the U.S. economy,” the president of Seaport Securities Corp., Theodore Weisberg, said on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. “We were guided much lower than we should have been in the aggregate earnings. Earnings have clearly come in better than expected.”
