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DOW + 40 = 17,652
SPX + 1 = 2039
NAS + 5 = 4680
10 YR YLD – .02 = 2.34%
OIL – 2.79 = 74.39
GOLD + .20 = 1162.90
SILV – .01 = 15.77

Record high close for the Dow Industrials.

The Nasdaq Composite hasn’t seen record highs since the spring of 2000, when it closed at 5048, which is just 368 points, or about a 7% move from here. If you were unlucky enough to have bought the PowerShares QQQ exchange-traded fund, an ETF that tracks that top 100 non-financial stocks in the Nasdaq, on March 10, 2000, you’d still be in the red on that investment.

Tech companies are once again in a leadership role. While Microsoft, Apple and several other tech leaders of today are trading at higher prices than 15 years ago, Intel and Cisco are still well below their 2000 peak prices. Of course the largest company in market cap is Apple at $660 billion. Apple shares have surged more than 40% so far this year, creating more than $160 billion in market value for shareholders, which coincidentally is about the same market cap as IBM, which was once considered the big player in tech. Today, Microsoft passed Exxon to become the second largest company in terms of market capitalization. Exxon has a market cap of $400 billion; Microsoft is worth $408 billion. Exxon’s declining fortunes can be tied directly to the price of oil.

Have you stopped by a gas station in the past few days? I did. I paid $2.78 a gallon. Gas prices have been falling for the past 48 days, and the nationwide average is now $2.92 a gallon, the lowest since December of 2010.

Crude oil prices were down again today after OPEC said demand for its oil will drop next year, and Saudi Arabia remained silent about a possible cut in production. There is another OPEC meeting in 2 weeks, and it is possible that OPEC members Venezuela and Nigeria will cut production, but today the Saudis merely reiterated their policy of stable global markets as they rejected rumors of a price war.