A massive market snapback on Friday couldn’t erase all of the week’s damage. After several days of selling, the tech sector roared back, with the Nasdaq gaining over 2% on Friday. Chipmakers Nvidia and Broadcom led the way, with gains of 7.8% and 7.2%, respectively. The broad-based S & P 500 rose nearly 2% in a session. Despite the late-week rally, both indexes posted declines for the week. The Nasdaq lost 1.8%, while the S & P 500 lost 0.1%. The story was different for the Dow , which benefited from the rotation out of growth names in software and tech and into value areas like financials and industrials. The 30-stock benchmark rose more than 1,200 points on Friday, hitting an all-time high close of 50,115. The Dow finished up 2.5% for the week. .IXIC .SPX,.DJI mountain 2026-02-02 Nasdaq, S & P 500, Dow since Feb. 2 “It’s a mighty Dow rally,” Jim Cramer said at Friday’s Morning Meeting, adding that “we’ve got a lot of mighty Dow [in the portfolio] so I’m feeling pretty good about it.” With the exception of Amazon and Verizon, each stock in the average was up on Friday. Of the Trust portfolio’s 34 holdings, 11 are Dow names, including Apple , Home Depot , Microsoft , and Honeywell . We’ll see if Friday’s rally has legs come Monday. Until then, here are three significant moments that drove the market last week. 1. Everybody cared about capex Wall Street views the hyperscalers as a check on the AI trade, given their massive investments in the nascent technology. Alphabet and Amazon both announced massive increases in capital expenditures for the year to build their data centers and AI offerings. But investors reacted differently to the news. The Google parent reported a fantastic fourth-quarter late Wednesday and announced that its 2026 spending could be more than double that of the previous year. Investors took the eye-popping increase in stride. Although shares fell 0.5% Thursday, it was still much better than the Nasdaq’s 1.5% loss that day. Amazon stock tumbled 5.5% on Friday after its results on Thursday evening missed management’s current-quarter profit forecast. Still, it was a solid quarter overall for the cloud computing and e-commerce giant. 2. Software stocks took a beating — and took the rest of tech down too Software stocks got crushed early this week amid fears that AI will eat into the market share of traditional enterprise software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies. While the selling has been going on for months, it accelerated on Tuesday after Anthropic released a new automation tool for legal work. As portfolio director Jeff Marks pointed out , AI is a threat to the sector; however, this week’s sell-off brought down both companies directly in the line of fire and those with staying power, including best-of-breed cybersecurity companies. AI should actually be a tailwind to these businesses. We used the decline in CrowdStrike ‘s stock price to add to our position. After all, demand for CrowdStrike’s cybersecurity offerings has…
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