Stock gain not enough to save losing week

Stocks shook off another bout of volatile trading and finished solidly higher Friday, led by gains in technology and health care companies. Despite the rally, the S&P 500 still posted its fourth straight weekly loss, extending Wall Street’s September swoon.

The S&P 500 rose 1.6 percent after flip-flopping between small gains and losses a fewtimes in the early going. Stocks have been erratic this month, with indexes setting new highs to start the month and then falling sharply as investors worried that values for some of technology giants had risen too high.

The benchmark index ended the week with a 0.6 percent loss for its first four-week losing streak in more than a year. The index is now down 5.8 percent for September, following five straight months of gains.

The S&P 500 came within striking distance of a 10 percent drop from its all-time high earlier thisweek, what Wall Street calls a correction. Friday’s gains reflect, in part, traders taking advantage of the selling to snap up stocks at lower prices, said David Lyon, global investment specialist at J.P. Morgan Private Bank.

“You’re getting a market that got close to a 10 percent correction, so you’re starting to see buyers step in to buy the dip,” Lyon said.

Fund managers also tend to make moves toward the end of a quarter to bolster their portfolios, another reason for the endof-the-week buying spree, he said.

Stocks have struggled this month amid a long list of concerns. Chief among them is that stocks may have gotten too expensive following their recordbreaking run through the summer, after storming 60 percent higher. Critics say Big Tech stocks in particular rose too high, even after accounting for their tremendous growth even as the coronavirus weakened the economy.

“This week, and the month of September, is really what we’re calling the give-back month,” Lyon said. ”(Stock) valuations got expensive and this is a natural settling of the market, kind of giving back some of those advance returns that were probably ahead of themselves.”

Big Tech stocks recovered from an early slide. Apple gained 3.8 percent, Microsoft rose 2.3 percent and Google’s parent company, Alphabet, added 1.1 percent.

Traders also bid up shares in cruise lines. Norwegian Cruise Line notched the biggest gain in the S&P 500, vaulting 13.7 percent. Carnival jumped 9.7 percent and Royal Caribbean Group climbed 7.7 percent.