Tech rebound pulls stocks out of a slump and to weekly gain
Wall Street capped a volatile day of trading Friday with a broad rally that snapped the market’s threeday losing streak.
The S&P 500 gained 2% after clawing back from a 1% skid that followed a 1% surge at the start of trading. Other stock indexes went through similar zigzags, but finished with solid gains.
The late-afternoon turnaround made up for some of the losses that the market began racking up after kicking off the week with the S&P 500’s biggest gain since June. The index, which briefly slipped into the red for the year on Thursday, managed to end the week 0.8% higher, its first weekly gain in three weeks.
The market’s latest gyrations came as investors struggled to figure out what an encouraging report on the economy and the recent march higher for bond yields should mean for the market.
“Ultimately, investors will conclude that they’ll be happy to take the bad with the good,” said Sam Stovall, chief investment strategist at CFRA. “The bad thing being higher interest rates and the good being an improvement in the economy.”
The S&P 500 rose 73.47 points to 3,841.94. The Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 572.16 points, or 1.9%, to 31,496.30. Earlier, it had been down 157 points. The Nasdaq composite climbed 196.68 points, or 1.6%, to 12,920.15. The techheavy index earlier flipped between a gain of 1.2% and a loss of 2.6%.
Smaller company stocks outgained the broader market, as they have all year. The Russell 2000 index picked up 45.29 points, or 2.1%, to 2,192.21.
The spark for all the uncertainty Friday was a government report that showed employers added hundreds of thousands more jobs last month than economists expected. That’s an encouraging sign for the economy, and it helped lift Treasury yields, with the closely watched 10-year yield momentarily topping 1.60%.
The yield later fell back from that midday spike and wound up at 1.56%, only slightly higher than a day earlier. It remains well above its roughly 0.90% level at the end of last year.