Market indices on track for best day since November, communications leads sector gains

Yahoo Finance's Jared Blikre looks at key market performers in the final hour of trading on Thursday.

Video transcript

SEANA SMITH: Jared, when you take a look at some of the leadership sector wise, at least, communication services and technology really the outperformers this afternoon.

JARED BLIKRE: Definitely, Seana, and I think investors have been wondering where is this Santa Claus rally. We're about midway through, so nice to see some gains today, although we're roughly breakeven when you count the days back to Friday when that officially began. But let's keep it with the NASDAQ here. Here is what's happened today. So this is the best day since November. In fact, all the indices are having their best day since November today so far.

But interesting thing, we had our record high for the NASDAQ on the very first trading day of the year. And only yesterday we saw the lowest point of the year, at least in terms of the settlement. So that doesn't happen very often. Just thought I'd point that out. But we are in the green today. And if you take a look at the sector action, it's really the tech sector. And that's XLK specifically, but also communication services. That's XLC and XLY, which is consumer discretionary. Amazon's in there, tech really dominating here. So these unloved mega-cap sectors that have gotten really hit this month.

Let me just take a one-month view here. And you can see XLY, consumer discretionary the worst off. Tech, XLK not doing that much better itself. When you take all this into consideration, not a bad day. Now here's the NASDAQ 100. A standout, Tesla. We're going to be talking about this. Tesla is up 6%, snapping its seven-day winning streak unless something happens over the next hour. Apple also up 3%, coming off a 52-week low. So really important to track these gains here, Seana.