S&P 500 Closes at 7,640 with a Solid 1.17% Gain Led by Tech
As seen on the 24/7 Wall St. homepage on September 17, 2026.
- S&P 500+1.17%
- Nasdaq Composite+1.60%
Tech did the heavy lifting again: the Nasdaq's 1.61% close outpaced the S&P 500 by nearly half a point, so anyone underweight big tech lagged the market today.
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The S&P 500 added 88.57 points to finish at 7,640.82, building on a previous close of 7,552.25. The gain held fairly steady through most of the session, with the index spending the back half of the day comfortably above a 1% advance before nudging higher into the final hour.
The Nasdaq Composite outran the broader market, closing up 1.61% compared to the S&P 500's 1.17% rise. That nearly half-point gap is a meaningful signal: the day's returns were not evenly distributed across sectors, and tech-heavy portfolios captured meaningfully more of the upside.
For investors benchmarked to the S&P 500, the day was straightforward. But anyone running an underweight position in large-cap technology stocks would have trailed the index by a visible margin, a reminder of how concentrated the drivers of daily index performance can be.
The intraday shape of the move tells its own story. The index dipped into the mid-morning before finding footing and stepping up through the afternoon, suggesting buying interest strengthened rather than faded as the session wore on.