S&P 500 Shatters Records, Hits All-Time High of 7,019 as Tesla Stock Stages Spectacular Comeback

A major Wall Street firm warns the S&P 500's blistering rally to a new all-time high of 7,019 could be setting the stage for a sharp 10% correction. The benchmark index surged 0.80% to close at 7,022.95 on Wednesday, April 16, 2026, marking its tenth gain in eleven sessions, while the Nasdaq Composite soared 1.59% to a record 24,016.02 for its eleventh consecutive advance, even as the Dow Jones Industrial Average bucked the trend with a slight decline.
Traders push the S&P 500 and Nasdaq to records as the rally gets faster
The speed of this rally is now one of the main stories. On Wednesday, the Nasdaq Composite pushed into overbought territory after its relative strength index, or RSI, climbed above 70. That happened just 11 trading days after the index had closed in oversold territory on March 30.
RSI is a common technical signal that tracks how quickly prices have risen or fallen, in which a reading below 30 usually means a market looks oversold, and a reading above 70 usually means it looks overbought.
In this case, the jump from below 30 to above 70 took only 11 sessions, which makes it the fastest such swing in data going back to the early 1980s.
The rally has also lined up with an 11-day winning streak for the Nasdaq, its first streak that long since November 2021. Over that run, the index has gained 15%. That is its best 15-day stretch since March 2022. Traders have been piling back into risk as bets grow that the fighting tied to Iran may not last as long as feared.
Software names also came roaring back. The iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF rose more than 3% on Wednesday and is now up almost 10% for the week. That rebound came right after the ETF fell more than 7% last week. The earlier drop came as traders worried that Anthropic’s Claude Mythos could hit the software-as-a-service business hard. This week, that fear eased enough for buyers to return.
Among Dow stocks, Microsoft was up nearly 4% in midday trading and Salesforce gained about 3%. For the week, Microsoft is now up 10% and Salesforce is up close to 7%. Inside the S&P 500, Datadog rose 7% and ServiceNow gained 6% on Wednesday. Both stocks are up more than 12% this week.
Tesla climbs as chip progress, factory plans, and software changes lift the stock
Tesla was one of the loudest names stock closed nearly 8% higher at $391.95 after chief executive Elon Musk said the company’s upcoming AI5 chip had reached an important engineering target and was getting closer to production.
Tesla is also planning two advanced chip factories in Austin, Texas, with SpaceX, one site is meant to build chips for vehicles and robots, while the other is meant to produce chips for orbital data centers. Intel has also joined the Tesla-SpaceX Terafab project.
On Tuesday, UBS changed its rating on Tesla from sell to hold and raised its price target to $352, about a dollar above its earlier target. The stock had already gained a little more than 3% on Tuesday, and it is now up more than 12% this week.
In the note, analyst Joseph Spak and his team said work on a smaller SUV was a welcome development because Tesla’s current light-duty vehicle lineup is too limited, with that lineup now including the Model 3 sedan, the Model Y SUV, and the steel-bodied Cybertruck.
The company has stopped selling the Model S and Model X while part of its Fremont, California factory moves toward production work tied to the Optimus humanoid robot.
The stock also got support from Tesla’s spring software update. The update made it easier for drivers to subscribe to Full Self Driving (Supervised) and check touchscreen data showing how often they use it.
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