A New Tech Streak

By Alex Eule |  Thursday, June 18

Crawling Back. The Nasdaq Composite continued its march higher today. The tech-heavy index rose 0.3% for its fifth consecutive gain. The Nasdaq has nearly recovered the losses it suffered during last Thursday's one-day tumble, and it's nearly back to all-time highs.

The S&P 500 also rose, though just barely, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 40 points. It was dragged down by weak days from two financials, American Express and Goldman Sachs Group.

The Nasdaq's strong day came even as a new wave of tech regulation begins to build. Australia's antitrust regulator said it was looking deeper into Google's planned $2.1 billion acquisition of Fitbit, the maker of activity tracking devices. The scrutiny adds to a long week of new investigations into Big Tech. Europe is building a case against Apple's App Store and its 30% commission rate. The EU is also reportedly looking into Amazon.com's practices around third-party resellers. 

Shares of Google-parent Alphabet fell 1.3% today, but big tech generally remains immune from the regulation worries -- for now.  Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook -- were all up on the day.

Economic news continues to put the market's rebound in a precarious spot. The latest round of jobless claims came in at 1.5 million, worse than a forecast for 1.2 million. The figure is still lower than last week's revised level of 1.57 million claims, marking the 11th consecutive week of declines. 

There was some good news from a key manufacturing index: The Philadelphia Fed manufacturing index rose to 27.5, the first positive reading since February, suggesting improving conditions in the mid-Atlantic region. A month ago, the index was -43.1. From the Philly Fed: 

The indexes for current activity, new orders, and shipments returned to positive territory after negative readings over the past few months. The survey’s price indexes suggest positive pressure in both the prices of firms’ inputs and manufactured goods. The survey’s future indexes indicate that respondents expect growth over the remainder of the year.