Money Minute: Will Stocks Soar Again in 2014? Fiat Buys All of Chrysler

Investors are hoping 2014 brings as many happy returns as 2013 did.

Last year was a banner year for investors and you didn't have to be a market pro to do really well. If you put your money into an index fund at the beginning of the year and just left it there, you did very well.

For all of 2013, the Dow industrials soared 3,472, or 26.5 percent. It was the Dow's fifth straight yearly gain. The S&P rallied nearly 30 percent and the Nasdaq outdid them all, jumping 38 percent. Nine out of 10 of the stocks in the S&P 500 gained ground last year.

Recapping Tuesday's trading, the Dow Jones industrial average (^DJI) rose 72 points, closing at its 52nd record high for the year. The Standard & Poor's 500 index (^GPSC) rose 7, and the Nasdaq composite index (^IXIC) gained 22 points.

The big question now for investors is: will the rally continue? As always, opinions vary widely, but the consensus estimate of market pros is for a gain in 2014 of 6-to-8 percent, with some bumps in the road along the way.

Learn to say Chrysler with an Italian accent. The Italian automaker Fiat has agreed to a nearly $4.4 billion deal to acquire the 41 percent of Chrysler held by a UAW health care trust. That means Chrysler won't be going pubic after all. The deal gives Fiat total control and it values Chrysler at more than $10 billion.

Google (GOOG) has slashed the price of its flagship phone, the Moto X. It now costs $399 for the 16 gigabyte version, down from $550. That's much cheaper than most of the other high-end smartphones on the market.

Do you remember the commercial for the Samsung Galaxy showing people meeting on the street and bumping their phones together to transfer information? Well, the company behind that technology -- named Bump -- was acquired by Google a few months back, and now Google is shutting down the service. It apparently wanted the people behind it more than the technology itself.

-Produced by Drew Trachtenberg.