Wall Street Drifts as It Closes Out Its Best Week Since November.
U.S. stocks are giving back some of their big gains from earlier in the week as Wall Street’s rally loses some steam on Friday.
The S&P 500 was 0.2% lower in early trading and on track for its first drop in seven days. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 29 points, or 0.1%, as of 9:35 a.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 0.3% lower.
Treasury yields were also dipping in the bond market after a report showed homebuilders broke ground on fewer projects last month. The weaker-than-expected data tossed a bit of cold water on the market following a flurry of better-than-expected reports this week on everything from inflation to sales at U.S. retailers.
Advanced Materials helped pull the market lower and dropped 4.1% despite delivering a better-than-expected profit report. That helped offset a 13.6% leap for H&R Block, which reported a bigger-than-expected profit for the latest quarter and increased its dividend while announcing a program to buy back up to $1.5 billion of its stock.
The strong economic reports earlier this week helped Wall Street right itself following a scary few weeks where stocks had reeled worldwide on a range of worries.
One centred on the strength of the U.S. economy after a particularly weak report on U.S. hiring raised concerns the Federal Reserve has kept interest rates too high for too long in its efforts to extinguish high inflation. A second focused on whether investors had taken the prices of Nvidia and other highly influential Big Tech stocks too high in their frenzy around artificial intelligence technology. A third was more technical, where a hike to interest rates by the Bank of Japan forced hedge funds and other investors around the world to abandon a popular trade en masse. They had borrowed Japanese yen at cheap rates to invest elsewhere.
Many of those questions still hang over the market, though not as precariously as before. The S&P 500 is heading for its best week since November.
In the bond market, the yield on the 10-year Treasury dipped to 3.88% from 3.92% late Thursday.
In stock markets abroad, Japan’s Nikkei 225 jumped 3.6% to cap its best week in more than four years.
Indexes rose 1.9% in Hong Kong and 0.1% in Shanghai after Chinese central bank governor Pan Gongsheng said in an interview with Chinese state media on Thursday that it is developing new policies aimed at supporting economic growth in the second half of the year.
Indexes were mostly higher across the rest of Asia and Europe.