Blue chips fizzled into the close to end down 12 points. The S&P 500 crept up 1 point and the Nasdaq jumped 73 points - enough for both to log new closing highs into the record books.

Tech outperformed on Thursday as investors looked for a safe place to hide in a choppy session, says Terence Gabriel. He's the Stocks Buzz analyst at Thomson Reuters.

"A lot's been built in, so it does seem to be a moment where certainly what have been the winners, some of these value stocks, financials, energy, small caps, they're stumbling where the market is rotating a bit back into some of those sort of bigger cap growth stocks that it feels may be a sort of safer area to concentrate on when you have suddenly uncertainty creeping back in here."

Mixed economic news put a cap on any upside moves outside of tech.

900,000 new Americans signed up for jobless benefits last week, though that number was down slightly week-to-week, it's still way above the peak during the financial crisis. The elevated numbers raise the risk the U.S. could post a second straight month of net job losses. All-in-all, some 16 million Americans received some sort of government unemployment assistance during the first week of January.

But on the bright side: permits for future home building projects surged last month to a 14-year high and manufacturing activity in the mid-Atlantic region accelerated this month, thanks to a boom in new orders.

Investors also had to contend with mixed earnings. Shares of United Airlines tumbled nearly 6 percent after posting its fourth straight quarterly loss.

Intel, the humbled chip giant, topped both sales and profit forecasts. It also guided current quarter estimates higher.