Wall Street continued to bid shares of most equities higher on Tuesday, encouraged by several economic indicators that were more encouraging than expected.

New home sales in May were above consensus, coming in at 676,000 versus expectations for 635,000.

Another measurement of private U.S. business activity by IHS Markit, the U.S. Composite Output Index, showed a second straight month of improvement, although the 46.8 figure for June shows contraction. Anything below 50 reflects a decline in manufacturing and services.

A reading of 46.8, despite signaling contraction, was taken with a grain of salt by investors, who appeared encouraged that the reading improved upon May’s reading of 37 and April’s record-low reading of 27.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 131 points, or 0.5%, to finish at 26,156. The Nasdaq hit another high, closing up 0.7% on the day.

Records for Amazon, Apple, Facebook. The tech-heavy Nasdaq has handily outperformed the other two widely quoted U.S. equity indices in 2020, the S&P 500 and the Dow – and has done so in no small part because of great performance by Big Tech stocks.

Apple (ticker: AAPL ), Amazon ( AMZN ) and Facebook ( FB ) all hit record highs on Tuesday, as investors continue to wager on three of the most financially powerful companies in the world, all of which have huge competitive advantages, with so many users.

Dell weighs VMWare spin; stock surges. Dell ( DELL ) is reportedly mulling some sort of spinoff of its large position in enterprise software company VMware ( VMW ), which Dell owns an 81% economic interest in. Shares of Dell were up in after-hours action on the news, while VMware stock jumped more than 8% in late trading.

Separations like this can often be good for shareholders of both companies, as each is freed up to focus more exclusively on their own operations.

Upgradeable Benz? Nvidia ( NVDA ), a leading chipmaker whose technology is central to many cutting-edge artificial intelligence, machine learning and computer vision advancements, is teaming with Mercedes-Benz to help make the automaker’s cars updateable through over-the-air updates.

Such architecture, popularized by Tesla ( TSLA ), is increasingly considered necessary by the major car manufacturers for autonomous vehicles. Updateable Mercedes should be available by 2024, according to the announcement.

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