US stocks surge to record highs, Dow hits 20,000 historic milestone

The US equity markets resumed with their post-election rally, with all major indices hitting intraday record highs on Wednesday. Largely positive quarterly earnings season also buoyed investor sentiment and is supportive of the ongoing upsurge in the markets.

At the time of writing, the Dow Jones Industrial Average advanced around 100-point and broke through 20,000 major milestone for the first time, while S&P 500 Index added 10-points and climbed to 2,290. Meanwhile, tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index gained around 38-points, or 0.65%, and rose to 5,640.

Of late the Trump-rally was seen running out of steam amid uncertainty over his fiscal policies. The sentiment, however, got a fresh boost from Trump's numerous executive orders – including Tuesday's executive orders to move forward with the construction of controversial infrastructure projects, Keystone XL and the Dakota Access pipelines. 

The actions supported market expectations that Trump will unleash a raft of pro-business policies and ramp-up infrastructure spending, which would eventually turn out to be a boon for his goal of faster economic growth.

It, however, remains to be seen if the current leg of up-move is sustainable or will be utilized to off-load long bets.

Technical outlook

Carol Harmer, Founder at charmertradingacademy.com notes, “as the daily stochastics are turning bullish from neutral levels...and also on the pullback we only retraced 23.6 of the move higher from Nov....so bearing all this in mind is the S&P ready for another leg higher...”

She further writes, “we are turning bullish off the 50% stochastics area...and because of this there is scope for the market to trade higher.....watch 2289 trendline....If we cannot break above here there is scope for a move higher...”