US stocks on Friday extended their rally and the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ Composite indices scored their biggest weekly percentage gains since the US elections in early November last year, boosted by optimism over earnings, stimulus talks and progress on vaccine rollouts.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 rose for a fifth straight session in their longest streak of gains since August last year, while the S&P 500 and NASDAQ posted record closing highs for a second day in a row.
A smaller-than-expected rebound in the US labor market last month highlighted the need for more government aid.
The US Department of Labor on Friday reported a 49,000 increase in non-farm payrolls last month, but job losses in manufacturing and construction.
US President Joe Biden and his Democratic allies in the US Congress moved ahead with their US$1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package as lawmakers approved a budget plan that would allow them to muscle Biden’s plan through in the coming weeks without Republican support.
“The upcoming package of stimulus is going to be big,” said Alan Lancz, president of Alan Lancz & Associates Inc, an investment advisory firm based in Toledo, Ohio.
“You have a situation where there’s a lot of cash on sidelines and bonds have really underperformed, so that’s helped some sectors that have really done poorly,” he said.
Upbeat earnings this week have also supported investor optimism. So far, stronger-than-expected corporate results in the fourth quarter have driven up analysts’ expectations, and S&P 500 companies are on track to post earnings growth for the period instead of a decline as initially expected.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average on Friday rose 92.38 points, or 0.3 percent, to 31,148.24, the S&P 500 gained 15.09 points, or 0.39 percent, at 3,886.83 and the NASDAQ Composite added 78.55 points, or 0.57 percent, at 13,856.30.
For the week, the S&P 500 gained 4.65 percent, the NASDAQ added 6.01 percent and the Dow increased 3.89 percent. The small-cap Russell 2000 index rose 7.7 percent for the week, its biggest weekly percentage gain since the week that ended on June 5 last year.
The CBOE Volatility index fell and had its biggest weekly point drop since the week that ended on Nov. 6 last year.
The S&P 500 technology index ended down 0.2 percent after hitting a record high earlier in the session.
Johnson & Johnson rose 1.5 percent after the drugmaker said it had asked US health regulators to authorize its single-dose COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use.
Shares of GameStop Corp, caught in a social media-hyped trading frenzy, rose 19.2 percent on Friday, after online broker Robinhood lifted all the buying curbs imposed at the height of the battle between amateur investors and Wall Street hedge funds.
Clover Health Investments Corp shares ended up 5.7 percent. It said it would cooperate with a request from the US Securities and Exchange Commission. US regulators are following up on a report about Clover by short-selling specialist Hindenburg Research.
Advancing issues outnumbered declining ones on the New York Stock Exchange by a 2.33-to-1 ratio; on NASDAQ, a 1.94-to-1 ratio favored advancers.
The S&P 500 posted 34 new 52-week highs and no new lows; the NASDAQ Composite recorded 286 new highs and four new lows.
Volume on US exchanges was 13.65 billion shares, compared with the 15.5 billion average for the full session over the past 20 trading days.
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
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