US stocks ended little changed on Friday, losing ground after US Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen’s comments on the economy unnerved investors.
Financial shares finished up for the day, giving the S&P 500 its biggest boost after stronger-than-expected bank results, but gave up most of their early gains.
The Dow Jones industrial average closed up 39.44 points, or 0.22 percent, to 18,138.38, the S&P 500 gained 0.43 points, or 0.02 percent, to 2,132.98 and the NASDAQ Composite added 0.83 points, or 0.02 percent, to 5,214.16.
Photo: AP
For the week, the Dow was down 0.6 percent, the S&P 500 was down 1 percent and the NASDAQ fell 1.5 percent.
Yellen, in a speech at a conference of policymakers and academics, laid out the deepening concern at the Fed that US economic potential is slipping — and might need aggressive steps to rebuild it.
“In looking at the market, I think, yes, [Yellen’s speech] had a dovish tilt to it if you took it literally,” said Quincy Krosby, market strategist at Prudential Financial in Newark, New Jersey.
DoubleLine Capital chief executive Jeffrey Gundlach said Yellen’s speech could suggest the US central bank will stay accommodative for longer.
Yellen did not address interest rates or immediate policy concerns directly. Traders have priced in a 70 percent chance of a rate hike in December.
The S&P 500 financial index was up 0.5 percent.
JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup trounced third-quarter estimates.
Wells Fargo & Co barely beat expectations as a sales scandal engulfed the bank. The bank has been under pressure following recent revelations that branch staff had opened as many as 2 million accounts without customers’ knowledge.
The bank earnings somewhat helped shore up Wall Street’s confidence on the outlook for third-quarter earnings after some disappointing results from industrial and healthcare companies.
S&P 500 earnings for the quarter are still expected to have declined 0.4 percent from a year ago, Thomson Reuters data showed.
Shares of Twitter fell 5.1 percent to US$16.88 after Salesforce.com’s chief executive ruled out bidding for Twitter.
Salesforce.com shares jumped 5.2 percent to US$74.27.
HP Inc fell 4.4 percent to US$14.48 after the company said it would cut about 3,000 to 4,000 jobs over the next three years.
About 6 billion shares changed hands on US exchanges on Friday, below the 6.6 billion daily average for the past 20 trading days, according to Thomson Reuters data.
Advancing issues outnumbered declining ones on the NYSE by a 1.03-to-1 ratio; on NASDAQ, a 1.07-to-1 ratio favored decliners.
The S&P 500 posted three new 52-week highs and three new lows; the NASDAQ Composite recorded 27 new highs and 80 new lows.
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
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Taiwanese manufacturers have a chance to play a key role in the humanoid robot supply chain, Tongtai Machine and Tool Co (東台精機) chairman Yen Jui-hsiung (嚴瑞雄) said yesterday. That is because Taiwanese companies are capable of making key parts needed for humanoid robots to move, such as harmonic drives and planetary gearboxes, Yen said. This ability to produce these key elements could help Taiwanese manufacturers “become part of the US supply chain,” he added. Yen made the remarks a day after Nvidia Corp cofounder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said his company and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) are jointly
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