Everyone loves nice round numbers and the market produced its share last week on the way to a 2% rise. The Dow Jones Industrial Average crossed over the 15,000 mark Friday for the first time but failed to hold it by inches. While the venerable index disappointed floor traders, who broke out the Dow 15,000 baseball caps, the broader Standard & Poor’s Index broke through and finished above 1,600.

Investors were primed for a bad Friday on expectations of poor jobs data. Instead, the figures were stronger than anticipated, which improved sentiment. There’s been a notable sector mini-rotation, too, as tech stocks, one of the worst performers of 2013, jumped 5% last week and finished at the top.

On the week, the Dow closed at 14,973.96, up 1.8%, or 261 points, while the S&P 500 added 32 points to end at 1614.42, record highs for both. The Nasdaq Composite index added 99 points, up 3% to 3,378.63.

Friday, the Labor Department said payrolls rose 165,000 last month, and the unemployment rate fell to 7.5%, the lowest level since late 2008, from 7.6%.

With stocks hitting all-time highs, we asked for an update from the two market forecasters who have been successful in prior forecasts. Both see the 2013 rally continuing.

Stephen Auth, Federated Investors’ chief investment officer, remains unbowed. His 1,660 S&P 500 year-end 2013 doesn’t look so far off as it did on Dec. 31, when the S&P 500 finished at 1,426.

“We can get a market melt-up from here,” he opines, as a rotation back into cyclicals gathers steam. The 2013 rally has been piloted by defensive sectors, but in the last week or so, tech, industrial, and materials stocks have led because long-term risk perceptions are easing, he says.

Those perceptions remain, he adds, the issue for the market getting to 1,660 — still his 2013 target — and will affect the market price/earnings ratio, he says. “Most recently, the debt woes of Cyprus were supposed to be Europe’s Lehman moment, but it wasn’t. Before that it was the U.S. fiscal cliff, Spain, Italy, etc.,” he says.

Cyprus broke the bears’ back, he asserts. The market’s forward P/E, now less than 15 times S&P 500 index earnings-per-share estimates of $110, could rise to 17 to 18 eventually, he says, as the risk perception eases more. That view includes inflation of 1% to 2% and bond yields a more-normal 4% to 5%.

Tobias Levkovich, chief U.S. equity strategist for Citi Research, believes the market will move to 1,650-1,675 and overshoot his year-end target of 1,615. “People will capitulate to the trade,” he says, and first-quarter earnings are coming in all right.

Citi’s strategist says the market will correct in the fall on the possible tapering off of central-bank easing, continued European economic woes, and no resolution to the U.S. fiscal battles in Washington.

That’s a long way off, and investors still have to navigate the summer, the market’s traditional weakest period (Source:  Barrons Online).