The Dow briefly breached 40,000 points for the first time on Thursday, but ultimately failed to reach this milestone, closing slightly below this level. Investors say this milestone could help further boost Wall Street optimism.

Chris Zaccarelli, chief investment officer of the Independent Advisor Alliance, said, “Breaking through 40,000 points is a huge psychological boost for bulls, because integers have special significance in people's minds.”

The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 39,869 points, down about 39 points, or 0.1%. Earlier in the day, it reached an intraday high of 40,051.05 at around 11:00 a.m. EST.

Integer milestones can get the market's attention. When the Dow Jones first surpassed 10,000 points on March 29, 1999, it spawned a small industry of commemorative products, especially hats with “Dow Jones 10,000,” which can still be easily found on eBay.

However, the expected Dow Jones 40,000 point milestone did not cause the same fanfare among Americans as it did in 1999. In fact, analysts pointed out that public interest in this record stock market rally was lackluster at best.

Despite this, the Dow Jones Index has remained the public standard for measuring the US stock market since its inception in 1896, even though the S&P 500 index launched in 1957 is regarded by investment professionals as the true benchmark for large cap stocks.

Since peaking in June 2022, the number of searches for “Dow Jones” on Google has been declining. Nicholas Colas, co-founder of DataTrek Research, pointed this out in a report last week.

Colas said that at the time, the Federal Reserve was preparing to launch a series of drastic interest rate hikes. As the stock market declined due to recession fears, the American public took notice. Since then, even as the stock market returned to record levels, public interest gradually waned.

“To some extent, Americans see the stock market as a sign of overall economic health, yet they don't see news that could be viewed as optimistic,” he wrote. “The concept of stock prices as a transmission mechanism between the market and consumers only seems to work in one direction.”

At the same time, for investors, such progress itself may not mean much.

“I think if it makes any sense, it's more nostalgic and symbolic than a meaningful signal for professional investors,” Eric Freedman, chief investment officer at Bank of America Wealth Management, said in a March phone interview when the Dow Jones Index was close to 40,000 points but failed to break through.

The blue chip index, the S&P 500 index, and the Nasdaq Composite all hit record highs on Wednesday as the Dow Jones index tried to break through 40,000 points.

The S&P 500 also broke through an important milestone of its own earlier this year, surpassing 5,000 points for the first time. Although the S&P 500 represents a larger portion of the US investable stock market, its historic developments are often less impressive than the Dow Jones Index.

The first time the Dow Jones index closed above 30,000 points was on November 24, 2020, when the stock market rebounded strongly from the COVID-19 bear market at the beginning of the year.

As of Thursday, it had been 873 trading days since the Dow Jones first closed above 30,000 points, according to Dow Jones market data. Dow Jones spent 966 trading days from closing above 20,000 points to breaking through 30,000 points. The date it first closed above 20,000 points was January 25, 2017.

Of course, every next milestone seems less impressive in percentage terms. The increase from 30,000 to 40,000 points was 33.3%. It took 4,486 trading days for the Dow Jones Index to double from 10,000 points to 20,000 points.

Meanwhile, public indifference to the 40,000 point milestone is likely to have at least one bullish counterpoint for the market. Colas said: “No one can blame the recent rise in the US stock market for being driven by fanatical interest in stocks. This isn't the 1990s; it's far from it.”