U.S. stocks rose, sending the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index to close above 2,000 for the first time, as reports showed the biggest ever jump in durable-goods orders and an unexpected increase in consumer confidence.

Amazon.com Inc. added 2.3 percent after the company said it’s buying video-game service Twitch Interactive Inc. in one of its biggest-ever acquisitions. Tim Hortons Inc. jumped 8.5 percent after Burger King Worldwide Inc. agreed to acquire the coffee-and-doughnuts chain in a $11.4 billion cash-and-share deal. Best Buy Co. dropped 6.9 percent after posting a same-store sales decline that was steeper than analysts had projected.

The S&P 500 (SPX) rose 0.1 percent to 2,000.02 at 4 p.m. in New York, after climbing as high as 2,005.04. The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 29.83 points, or 0.2 percent, to 17,106.70, also reaching an all-time high intraday. About 4.5 billion shares changed hands on U.S. exchanges today, 20 percent below the three-month average.

“The 2,000 number got a lot of attention, but let’s get back to basics and see how the economy is doing,” Richard Sichel, chief investment officer at Philadelphia Trust Co., which oversees $2 billion, said in a phone interview.

Data today showed orders for U.S. durable goods jumped 23 percent in July as bookings surged for commercial aircraft. An air show in the U.K. helped drive a 318 percent jump in plane orders, the most since January 2011. A 0.5 percent drop in orders for non-military capital goods excluding aircraft last month followed a June increase of 5.4 percent.

The Conference Board’s consumer confidence index rose to 92.4 in August, the highest since October 2007, from a revised 90.3 a month earlier, the private research group said.

David Fuller's view

The S&P 500 Index has been very consistent since it pushed back above 1400 in November 2012, fuelled in part by quantitative easing (QE), which the US Federal Reserve is scheduled to end before November.  QE launched a strong rally followed by a ranging step sequence uptrend which remains intact today, despite (or perhaps because of) all the warnings that we have heard from various sources.

Round numbers of this magnitude are often reassessment points so it will be interesting to see what happens next.  Given the persistent rise since 8^th August, which has created a short-term overbought condition, we should not be surprised if the S&P encounters some resistance in the 2000 region.  In fact, it already has by ranging just beneath this level for most of July, before falling back to nearly 1900.  A break beneath that level would question the uptrend’s current consistency.