(Reuters) - Wall Street’s tech-heavy Nasdaq index was on track for its fourth straight day of gains on Wednesday, hitting a record high, while the S&P 500 and the Dow also inched higher.
Tesla shares jumped 7.1 percent after billionaire Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk reassured shareholders that building 5,000 of its mass-market Model 3 cars per week by the end of June was “quite likely”.
Troubled by the Facebook privacy scandal, worries over chipmakers and iPhone sales, as well as a generally shakier tone to stock markets since February, technology stocks have been back on a tear since the start of May.
“Investors are eager to find areas of the market in which there are still prospects of above-average revenue and earnings growth given that we are in the ninth year of economic cycle,” said Scott Clemons, chief investment strategist for Brown Brothers Harriman in New York.
“Investors are focused on areas where potential is still there with technology being one of them.”
Facebook fell 1.4 percent after the social networking company confirmed it had collaborated with at least four Chinese companies over sharing certain user data.
In the largest-ever shakeup of the stock market’s broad business sectors, Facebook and Google parent Alphabet will move from the top-performing technology sector to telecommunications and media stocks this fall.
Analysts have said that the move could inject more volatility into the markets as funds tracking these indexes will be forced to trade billions of dollars of stock to realign their holdings by a Sept. 28 effective date.
U.S. officials were weighing an offer by China to import an extra $70 billion of
