<body><p>STORY: U.S. stocks kicked off August with a rally on Monday, as the Dow added about one-and-a-third percent to close at a record high, the S&P 500 climbed one-and-a-half percent and the Nasdaq added more than two percent.</p><p>Communication services was the best performing of the 11 major S&P sectors, boosted by a 6% jump for Meta and a nearly 5% gain by Alphabet.</p><p>Jed Ellerbroek is portfolio manager at Argent Capital Management.</p><p>“Obviously, an extension from last week, in terms of the big cloud computing giants, doing well after their earnings report. And then I think we're also starting to see some semiconductor and AI data center CapEx beneficiary flow through and do well too. Nvidia, for example, is up I think a little more than 3% today. So, I guess a broad tech rally. And I think investors are becoming increasingly convinced that the return on investment from all of the CapEx spending that the big tech companies are doing has got an appealing ROI to it - both now and I think in the future, too. And so that's why we've seen those stocks rally so much here in the last three or four trading days. And that’s really an amazing contrast to just the week before.”'</p><p>:: Amazon</p><p>Sticking with tech, shares of Amazon gained about four-and-a-half percent as the company's market cap surpassed $3 trillion for the first time after its earnings results last week.</p><p>And shares of SpaceX, which will report its first quarterly results on Tuesday, jumped more than five-and-half percent. The stock has been trading below its $135 issue price for nearly three weeks after its debut in mid-June.</p><p>Meanwhile, crude prices settled down about 5% after President Donald Trump said on Sunday that talks with Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz would take place on Monday, though Iran disputed that talks were planned.</p><p>Lower oil prices helped push the S&P 500 Energy sector down more than one percent, making it the worst performing sector of Monday's session.</p></body>
