Markets hold onto gains ahead of the closing bell, Nasdaq clinches best January in over 20 years

Yahoo Finance markets reporter Jared Blikre details the positive signs of the markets from January.

Video transcript

DAVE BRIGGS: All right, just a couple minutes away from the closing bell, so let's bring in Yahoo Finance's Jared Blikre to break down the market action. What are we seeing, sir?

JARED BLIKRE: Dave, look at all this green. How happy can we be? NASDAQ leading the way, up a point and a half. Dow is lagging, but it's still up over 1%. The Russell 2000-- look at the small caps. They are up 2.4%.

And time now to delve into some of our tickers, and guess what? Artificial intelligence has been on the rise, and here we go. Intriguing investors today as well, bidding C3ai. It's up nearly 20%, second-best day ever. And this is as it looks to cash in-- guess what-- on the AI craze. And this is-- they have a new product that's helping workers locate data in the Byzantine world of corporate enterprise information systems. Think ChatGPT for your business.

Now overall, it's been a crazy week for AI, so let's take a look at this screen right here. We know AI is up 22%, but how about BuzzFeed? That was a ticker that was in the news just a couple days ago. Up an amazing few hundred percent there.

Now we've got to switch over to the streaming world, and let me just get our screen here because Roku is in the news, and they have a new partnership-- guess what-- with Warner Bros Discovery. And they're combining Warner's premium selection of FAST channels to the Roku channel, and it's coming this spring. Viewers are going to have access to 2,000 hours of on-demand TV, hundreds of titles to choose from along with movies from HBO and Discovery.

Now we can see Roku over the last year. Still firmly entrenched in the bottom end of this range. One of those disruption stocks we all know and love. But I'll tell you what, check out what's happened over the last couple of months here, and we'll see if I can get that chart up of a two day. There we go-- two months. And we see that Roku is up a whopping-- oh, it's down 2.9%. Not all of these end well.

So we've got to go to Caterpillar here, and for that, I'm going to find our Industrial screen. And might as well pull up the Dow Jones Industrial average because this is a read on the economy. Now, Caterpillar is putting its worst day in since September, and we might be measuring a slight fever here if we're trying to take its temperature. That's because Caterpillar missing on profits for the first time since the pandemic, and the company is struggling with higher input costs and supply-chain issues. But the company has high hopes for its sales of its signature yellow-orange heavy-duty construction and mining machines, and this is thanks to favorable prices and a competitive cost environment.

So here's Caterpillar up 6.9% today, 25% for the year, and look at this nice breakout right here. A number of industrial stocks that slumped or at least traded sideways last year are starting to break out. So something really to watch-- keep an eye on.

Now let's take a look at the NASDAQ. We've got a few seconds left here. The left side of the board not looking as good as the right, and that would mean the mega caps feeling some heat. That's over the last two months.

But in today's price action we have Amazon up 2 and 1/2%, Tesla up almost 4%, Microsoft up 2%, and the list goes on here. And since we're talking about chip stocks, might as well take a look at our chip board with AMD up 3 and 1/2%. And with that, I'm going to send you guys on to the closing bell here.