Caterpillar's stock has climbed 78% so far this year to reach a price above $1,000.
Caterpillar's stock stands above the rest of the Dow Jones Industrial Average this year, and its notable outperformance has now resulted in a major milestone.
For the first time, shares of Caterpillar climbed past the $1,000 mark in Monday's trading. Goldman Sachs Group's stock is the only other constituent above $1,000 in the Dow, which weights companies by price rather than by market capitalization. That means highly priced stocks can have an outsize impact on the index's direction.
Caterpillar's stock was the best Dow performer in Monday trading, as well as on a month-to-date and year-to-date basis. Shares are up more than 78% so far this year and easily on track for their best first-half performance on record, according to Dow Jones Market Data. The current record is a 42.7% gain seen in the first half of 1997
This highlights that, for all the buzz about technology stocks, the industrials sector has been a hot area for investors this year. In many ways, the stories are linked, as industrials companies offer equipment, power and other products or services that are benefiting from strong artificial-intelligence-linked demand.
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For instance, Caterpillar's power and energy segment "is becoming increasingly dominant as demand for its large reciprocating engines and turbines swells with data-center/AI capital spending," Gimme Credit analyst Carol Levenson wrote in a recent note to clients. This segment now accounts for about 40% of Caterpillar's revenue, similar to the contribution that the company gets from its construction-industries business, she said.
The industrials sector XX:SP500.20 of the S&P 500 SPX is up about 17% so far this year, making it the index's third-best-performing sector of 2026 to date, according to Dow Jones Market Data. The sector is on track for its strongest first-half performance since 2019.
"If we go back five years or so, the opportunity was we're building more roads, we're building more bridges, and infrastructure was stage one," Chris Semenuk, an investment partner at Tema ETFs, said on an episode of the "Other People's Money" podcast last week. With that infrastructure now built, the focus is broadening out, he noted.
Semenuk pointed to "unprecedented" backlogs at companies like Caterpillar and GE Vernova (GEV) as evidence of the "reindustrialization" theme. He thinks Caterpillar could start posting at least $10 in quarterly earnings per share by 2029, up from $5.54 in the most recent quarter.
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