Holiday bargain shopping boosts stocks in brief session
NEW YORK - Stocks rose in an abbreviated session Friday as investors capped a capricious week by engaging in a bit of holiday bargain hunting while awaiting word of how retailers might fare during what is expected to be a tough holiday-shopping season.
The Dow Jones industrial average rose 181.84 to 12,980.88, finishing at the highs of the session rather than losing steam in the final minutes as has occurred often in recent weeks.
Microsoft, one of the 30 Dow stocks, slipped 12 cents Friday to $34.11 a share and was off just 2 cents for the week. Boeing, also a Dow stock, bounced back by adding $2.13 a share Friday to $89.54, holding its loss for the week to 45 cents.
Broader stock indicators also rose. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index advanced 23.93, or 1.69 percent, to 1,440.70, and the Nasdaq composite index rose 34.45, or 1.34 percent, to 2,596.60.
For the week, the Dow lost 1.5 percent, the S&P fell 1.2 percent and the Nasdaq gave up 1.5 percent.
Friday’s holiday-shortened session followed fractious trading that on Wednesday saw the Dow and the S&P 500 give up more than 1.5 percent. The S&P’s climb Friday put the index back into positive territory for the year.
The day’s gains weren’t enough to reverse losses for the week, however, and observers cautioned the session could prove more an aberration than a reversal of recent trends. With many of Wall Street’s principal players on vacation, volume was light as is typical on such days.
With no major economic data arriving and not much in the way of corporate news, some investors appeared to make some pro forma trades and search for any insights into the health of the economy, particularly with the arrival of the holiday shopping season.
“While I’d love to celebrate this rally, it is on very thin volume and we have to really wait until next week to get a sense of the true direction of this market,” said Jack Ablin, chief investment officer at Harris Private Bank in Chicago.
Still, he said it’s a good sign that stocks didn’t extend Wednesday’s slide.
“It looks like a little rebound rally,” Ablin said. “Maybe the day off for Thanksgiving enabled investors to reflect that maybe the bottom isn’t falling out of the economy.”