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Nothing's more fitting on a Friday than a dose of market optimism. Phil Rosen here.

Yes, it's true — the Nasdaq 100 officially closed 20% above its December low this week, which means we are technically now in a bull market.

No time to dawdle today — let's jump in.

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1. There's at least one corner of the market running with the bulls again, and investors can thank the Fed for fueling tech stocks to their second-best quarter in the last decade.

The tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 has gained roughly 17% through the first three months of the year, and Wednesday marked the first time in nearly three years that it entered a bull market, extending those gains on Thursday.

The last time the index did this well was in April 2020 in the early days of the pandemic.

Between then and June 2020, the Nasdaq soared more than 30% as the government injected cash into the economy and fueled speculative bets on high growth names.

In response to March's turmoil that began with the fall of Silicon Valley Bank, traders have started predicting higher odds of interest rate cuts this year as the central bank confronts the effects of the crisis.

Those rate forecasts have bolstered tech names, and mega-caps like Apple and Microsoft have pulled the Nasdaq higher.

Nicholas Colas, the cofounder of DataTrek Research, pointed out Thursday that signs of financial stress have historically prompted investors to buy more stocks.

In a note to clients, he highlighted that the St. Louis Fed Financial Stress Index is currently hovering in the same ballpark as it was in July and August 2002, as well as October 2011 — two other periods of financial stress.

"Adding stock exposure at such periods has always been profitable over a 3-5 holding horizon, even if the nearer term has sometimes been rocky (2001 – 2002, for example)," Colas said.

"This strategy works because financial stress always draws a fiscal and/or monetary response. That puts the current elevated reading into a useful perspective: buying stocks here assumes there will be a Fed policy response (lower rates) in the very near future."

To Wedbush analyst Dan Ives, tech stocks are actually the new safe haven for investors.

"While it sounds like Twilight Zone comment to many investors, tech stocks have become the new safety trade with Big Tech names a major beneficiary of this dynamic," Ives, a managing director and senior equity research analyst at Wedbush, wrote in a note.

Tech was fairly insulated from the tumult in March stemming from the SVB implosion, and steep job cuts and a massive cash pile at many big companies have tech names looking pretty attractive to investors these days.