Wall Street caps another winning week

Negative consumer sentiment report takes bite out of gains

NEW YORK — U.S. stocks coasted to the close of another winning week on Friday.

The S&P 500 rose 8.60 points, or 0.2 percent, to 5,222.68 to finish a third straight winning week following its mostly miserable April. It had been on pace for a bigger gain in the morning, but that mostly disappeared following a discouraging report on U.S. consumer sentiment.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 125.08 points, or 0.3 percent, to 39,512.84, and the Nasdaq composite edged down by 5.40, or less than 0.1 percent, to 16,340.87.

The S&P 500 has climbed back within 0.6 percent of its record on revived hopes that the Federal Reserve may deliver cuts to interest rates this year. A flood of stronger-than-expected reports on profits from big U.S. companies has also helped support the market.

Gen Digital jumped 15.3 percent after reporting better profit for the first three months of 2024 than analysts expected. The cyber safety company, whose brands include Norton and Lifelock, also authorized a program to buy back up to $3 billion of its stock.

Novavax nearly doubled and shot 98.7 percent higher after announcing a deal with Sanofi that could be worth more than $1.2 billion.

They helped offset a drop of 11 percent for Akamai Technologies, which topped expectations for profit but fell short for revenue.

The cloud-computing, security and content delivery company also gave some financial forecasts for the upcoming year that fell short of analysts’ expectations.

In the bond market, Treasury yields rose following the discouraging preliminary report from the University of Michigan.

It suggested sentiment among U.S. consumers is weakening by much more than economists expected, and the drop was large enough to be “statistically significant and brings sentiment to its lowest reading in about six months,” according to Joanne Hsu, director of the survey of consumers.

Potentially even more discouraging is that U.S. consumers were forecasting inflation of 3.5 percent in the upcoming year, up from their forecast of 3.2 percent a month earlier.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury rose to 4.50 percent from 4.46 percent late Thursday. But the movement was still relatively modest compared with its drop from 4.70 percent late last month.