By Caroline Valetkevitch
NEW YORK (Reuters) – U.S. stocks closed higher on Monday, with Apple Inc hitting a $3 trillion market capitalization and Tesla Inc posting bumper delivery numbers, giving investors cheer on the year’s first trading day.
Apple became the first company to reach that milestone and its shares ended higher.
Tesla’s shares also climbed after the company’s quarterly deliveries beat analysts’ estimates, riding out global chip shortages as it ramped up production in China.
The two stocks gave the biggest boosts to the S&P 500.
“Those are the two big drivers for the S&P,” said Paul Nolte, portfolio manager at Kingsview Investment Management in Chicago.
But he and others said easing investor worries about the impact of the Omicron coronavirus variant also helped market sentiment, even with rising COVID-19 case numbers.
“The real news is people feel like this latest round of COVID is not going to be economically debilitating in that a lot of restrictions and lockdowns are going to be required,” said Stephen Massocca, senior vice president at Wedbush Securities in San Francisco.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorized a third dose of Pfizer Inc and BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine for children aged 12 to 15.
Energy and financial sectors also were among gainers.
All of Wall Street’s main indexes ended 2021 with monthly, quarterly and annual gains, recording their biggest three-year advance since 1999.
Unofficially, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 246.83 points, or 0.68%, to 36,585.13, the S&P 500 gained 30.41 points, or 0.64%, to 4,796.59 and the Nasdaq Composite added 187.83 points, or 1.2%, to 15,832.80.
Bank shares rose following a jump in U.S. Treasury yields on expectations of a series of U.S. interest rate hikes this year. [US/]
Wells Fargo’s shares rose, also helped by their upgrade to “overweight” by Barclays.
The benchmark S&P 500 added 27% in 2021 and reported 70 record-high closes, its the second-most ever, in a tumultuous year hit by new COVID-19 variants and supply chain shortages.
The Dow added 18.7% for the year and the tech-heavy Nasdaq gained 21.4%. (Graphic: SPX2021Yearend, https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/buzz/gdpzykyogvw/SPX2021FullYear.png)
(Additional reporting by Bansari Mayur Kamdar, Shashank Nayar and Medha Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Maju Samuel and Richard Chang)