NEW YORK: Wall Street stocks finished a quiet session mostly higher on Thursday (April 6), concluding a holiday-shortened trading week that has included weakening economic data.
Reports earlier in the week showed a softening in the labor market, a contraction in the manufacturing sector and slowing growth in services.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 2.57 points, or 0.01%, to 33,485.29, the S&P 500 gained 14.64 points, or 0.36%, to 4,105.02 and the Nasdaq Composite added 91.10 points, or 0.76%, to 12,087.96.
Markets will be closed on Friday to mark Good Friday, meaning that investors will have to wait until Monday to trade on important March employment figures.
“Bad news in the jobs data – if that’s what it brings early Friday – may be good news from an interest rate standpoint, but a slowing economy isn’t really something that tends to help stocks,” said a note from Charles Schwab.
US stocks spent much of Thursday morning in the red, but pushed into positive territory after Treasury bond yields eased.
Investors are becoming more hopeful that the Fed will hold off on additional interest rate hikes, in light of a cooling economy.
“The market is trying to decide whether the ‘growth and recession’ scare or the ‘Fed hiking’ scare are more meaningful to prices, and so it’s waffling between whether a softening labor market is good news because it gets the Fed to pause in May or bad news because it means the recession is actually coming,” said Ross Mayfield, an investment strategy analyst at Baird in Louisville, Kentucky.
Among individual companies, shares of Levi Strauss sank 16% as it confirmed its annual earnings forecast, citing its “cautious outlook on the macro-environment”.
Alphabet Inc rallied 3.8% and Microsoft climbed 2.6%, with both providing more fuel than any other stocks for the S&P 500's gain for the session. Alphabet's Google unit plans to add artificial intelligence features to its search engine, The Wall Street Journal reported. – AFP, Reuters