S&P 500 sets its 7th straight all-time high

NEW YORK – U.S. stocks pushed further into record heights on Friday following an encouraging report on hiring across the country, though trading was shaky as the bond market was hit with another day of sharp swings.

The S&P 500 rose 17.47, or 0.4%, to 4,697.53 and clinched an all-time high for the seventh straight day. The Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 203.72, or 0.6%, to 36,327.95, and the Nasdaq composite added 31.28, or 0.2%, to 15,971.59, both also setting all-time highs. The Russell 2000 index of smaller companies rose 34.65 points, or 1.4%, to 2,437.08.

Trading was scattershot, though, and after climbing to an early gain of 0.8%, the S&P 500 at one point gave up virtually all of it. Stocks retrenched in the middle of the day as Treasury yields surprisingly slumped.

The 10-year yield, which tends to move with expectations for the economy and inflation, dropped to 1.45% and is near its lowest level since September. It was at 1.58% just two days earlier. Analysts had varying explanations for that and other sharp moves in the bond market, which some called counterintuitive.

The headline report of the day was the one from the Labor Department that showed employers hired a net 531,000 workers in October. That was more than 100,000 above economists’ expectations. The gains were widespread across industries.

One potential worry spot for markets was a big jump in workers’ wages, up 4.9% from a year earlier, which can feed into concerns about inflation. But the numbers were relatively in line with economists’ expectations.

“It was one of those Goldilocks reports,” said Nate Thooft, head of global asset allocation at Manulife Investment Management. Besides

showing stronger-than-expected hiring, “the simple reality was it wasn’t showing any overheating either.”

That’s why it was surprising that the 10-year Treasury yield fell so sharply to 1.44% from 1.52% late Thursday.

One possible reason was that investors see more people heading back to work as helping to clear the supply- chain bottlenecks that have hit the economy and driven up inflation, said Brian Jacobsen, senior investment strategist at Allspring Global Investments. That could lead to lowered expectations for inflation, which would add downward pressure on Treasury yields.

“The more people we get back to fill open positions will help keep that shortage pressure at bay a little bit,” said Matt Stucky, senior portfolio manager at Northwestern Mutual Wealth Management Co.

But the degree of moves in the bond market still took market watchers by surprise.

“Some of these moves look extreme to me,” Allspring Global Investment’s Jacobsen acknowledged, citing a sharp drop for the 30-year Treasury yield to 1.88% from 1.96%.

Gold for December delivery rose $23.30 to $1,816.80 an ounce. Silver for December delivery rose 25 cents to $24.16 an ounce, and December copper rose 2 cents to $4.34 a pound.

The dollar fell to 113.40 Japanese yen from 113.74 yen. The euro fell to $1.1550 from $1.1553 euro.