Dow, S&P 500 extend gains: How global markets are moving

The Dow Jones (^DJI) and the S&P 500 (^GSPC) extend their recent run, with the Dow even on pace to close above a record 38,000 points. Yahoo Finance Markets Reporter Jared Blikre monitors how international market indices are performing year-to-date alongside US markets.

For more expert insight and the latest market action, click here to watch this full episode of Yahoo Finance Live.

Editor's note: This article was written by Luke Carberry Mogan.

Video transcript

JULIE HYMAN: The DOW on track to close at a new record above 38,000, and so far this year it is US stocks that are outperforming. Jared Blikre is here in front of the big map to give us the details.

JARED BLIKRE: Thank you, Julie. It's not just the US. It's really specifically large cap US, and we're going to take a look at that in a second. Let's go to a look at our indices around the world on a year-to-date basis. And I'll decode some of these tickers for everybody, but this is year-to-date. And up front here with 9.2%, that is a Nikkei. Over in Japan they are up to a 34 year high-- not quite at a record, but almost there. 1989 was the year that they topped out. Finally regaining it, and it did take quite a long time.

Then we have Malaysia. Probably haven't heard a lot about that-- not a huge capital market, but nevertheless it is outperforming the NASDAQ, and the S&P 500 in the US, and also the DOW for that matter. But if you take a look at the green, it's basically the United States, Japan, and a couple of developing markets here and really not a lot else. And what's really dragging the world down-- I was taking a deeper dive into this this morning-- is China.

Hong Kong is down 12%, Shanghai Composite is down 7%, the KOSPI itself is down 7%, and why is that important? Well, the KOSPI is a really good proxy for the chip market. And despite the fact that we've seen this huge rise of interest in AI, it really hasn't translated into a lot of love for the KOSPI composite index right there, and in fact, a lot of that love is just being expressed in Nvidia and AMD and other US companies.

There's a lot of love to spread around, but I'm just noticing the trends year-to-date so far. Also, what I want to show you is the Russell 2000 here. Small caps are down 2.3%. And if you take a look at a two year char, that is just a bunch of chop. But we did have a small breakout-- it looks like it was a false break to the upside. As long as we're hanging around right here, there is a decent chance of a short term pop above there, and that would mean a lot for breaking out of that two year range, but we are not quite there just yet.

And then I want to show what's been happening inside the sectors as well. Tech-- no big surprise there, that has the likes of Apple and whatnot. Tech is up 4.5% followed by communication services-- that's a Meta and Alphabet story. Then we get into health care. Health care is a divergence from what we saw last year. It actually picked up at the back end of last year. Here is a two year chart, and you can see it itself is in a multi-year range. And in fact, health care is in a five-- or a three year range. If it were to break above, we would expect a lot of momentum to carry it, but so far we aren't there.

But-- Suffice to say, it's really been a story about US large cap tech. Can't get away with not saying the Mag Seven this year, but fortunately we have a new entrant-- health care.

JOSH LIPTON: All right. Big trend to watch. Jared, thank you so much. Appreciate it.