Investing.com -- The S&P 500 index opened at a new record high on Monday, rising as far as 3,042.10 as fresh hopes for a U.S.-China trade truce, the aversion of a Hard Brexit at the end of the month and supportive news for index heavyweights Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) and AT&T (NYSE:T) all helped to support sentiment.
Over the weekend, both the U.S. and Chinese governments had indicated that technical preparations for their so-called 'phase-1' deal had made good progress, with the Chinese Ministry of Commerce saying in a statement that the groundwork was "basically completed".
Risk appetite received a further boost on Monday morning when the European Union confirmed that it had offered the U.K. a three-month extension to the deadline for Brexit, definitively removing the risk of a disorderly rupture on Oct. 31.
In corporate news, Microsoft rose 3.2% to a new all-time high after it won a multi-billion dollar Cloud computing order from the Pentagon, beating out its biggest rival in the space, Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN). AT&T (NYSE:T) rose 3.8% after saying it was on track to meet its profit and deleveraging targets, and issuing a three-year action plan for raising shareholder value that was approved by activist investor Elliott Management.
By 9:38 AM ET (1338 GMT), the S&P 500 was at 3,040.59, up 18 points or 0.6% from Friday's close. It hit its previous record high of 3,027.98 on July 26.