Stock Market Today: Stocks Swing Higher on Strong Economic Data
An upbeat report on new home sales helped fuel an impressive rebound for stocks today.
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The sting of President Joe Biden's proposal to roughly double the capital gains tax for wealthy Americans eased today, with markets finishing a choppy week on a high note.
"I'm shocked the market was surprised that higher capital gains taxes are coming," says LPL Financial chief market strategist Ryan Detrick. "We knew this was going to happen the second President Biden won in November. Calmer heads prevailed today with the broad rally at least."
And a broad rally it was indeed, thanks in part to a few upbeat economic reports. Namely, data showed new home sales in the U.S. rose by more than 20% month-over-month in March, while the service sector expanded at its quickest pace since 2009 last month and factory activity signaled improvement in April.
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Tech stocks led the charge higher, with Apple (AAPL, +1.8%) and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD, +4.7%) two of the day's notable gainers. At the close, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 0.7% at 34,043, the S&P 500 was 1.1% higher at 4,180, and the Nasdaq Composite jumped 1.4% to 14,016.
Other action in the stock market today:
- The small-cap Russell 2000 jumped 1.8% to finish at 2,271.
- U.S. crude oil futures added 1.2% to settle at $62.14 per barrel.
- Gold futures declined 0.2% to $1,777.80 per ounce.
- The CBOE Volatility Index (VIX) plunged 7.4% to settle at 17.33.
- Bitcoin prices sank by 3.7% to $50,983. (Bitcoin trades 24 hours a day; prices reported here are as of 4 p.m. each trading day.)
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With over a decade of experience writing about the stock market, Karee Venema is the senior investing editor at Kiplinger.com. She joined the publication in April 2021 after 10 years of working as an investing writer and columnist at Schaeffer's Investment Research. In her previous role, Karee focused primarily on options trading, as well as technical, fundamental and sentiment analysis.
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