The Wall Street limo wasn’t a write off after all.

On Friday, it backed out of the ditch it crashed into earlier in the week and sped off, although there still appeared to be a bit of damage to its once shiny tech sector.

The 2.5% gain on the Dow saw it accelerate through the 50,000-point mark for the first time, pushed along by the very old school bulldozer business Caterpillar, which rose another 7% on Friday to be up more than 25% so far this year.

The S&P 500 gained 2% and the Nasdaq picked up 2.2%, its biggest one-day gain since November.

Despite that, the rotation out of tech stocks was still evident on Friday.

The Nasdaq fell almost 2% over the week, the S&P 500 was marginally lower, and the blue-chip Dow put on 2.5%.

“What’s driven it recently has been the broadening that we have seen in the market … across a number of areas, other than just the tech, AI trade,” Horizon Investment Services CEO Chuck Carlson told Reuters.

“The Dow is kind of the people’s index, and when you have a crossing of this kind of milestone (50,000 points), it maybe gives some folks food for thought and maybe puts a few dollars into the market,” Mr Carlson said.

Amazon was one of the few big losers of the day, falling 5.6% after saying it planned a more than 50% jump in capital expenditures this year, intensifying a race to dominate AI technology and following a similar announcement from Alphabet (AKA Google) on Wednesday.

However, most chip stocks rallied on expectations they would benefit from increased spending on AI data centres by Amazon and Alphabet.

Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices both gained around 8%.

European markets also enjoyed a rebound, with the broad Eurostoxx 600 up 0.9%, to be up around 1% for the week.

Futures trading points to the ASX gaining around 1.2% on opening, after the market shed 1.8% last week.

On commodity markets, gold regained some its lost lustre to be back trading just under (the still dizzy heights of) $US5,000/ounce.

“I do see a bit of a safe-haven investment coming in, but bear in mind that there is still some caution after last Friday’s selloff … we still have this fear about Iran-US tension that is still intact,” OANDA market analyst Kelvin Wong, said.

“It’s going to be a very near-term choppy price movement for gold between $5,169, which is the key short-term resistance and the key short-term support at the $4,400 level.”

The US-Iran tensions also impacted the oil market with global Brent crude benchmark up 0.7% to $US68.05/barrel.

With Reuters