Wall Street mixed as tech stocks rebound; Nasdaq up 1.1%
US stocks were mixed on Friday as tech stocks rebounded. The Dow fell 237 points, while the Nasdaq rose 1.1%. Stronger-than-expected October jobs data raised rate hike expectations.
Wall Street ended mixed on Friday, with technology stocks staging a rebound. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 51,285 points, down 237 points or about 0.5 per cent, after briefly recovering about 140 points in early trading.
The S&P 500 rose 23 points, or 0.3 per cent, to 7,376 points. The Nasdaq Composite gained 264 points, or about 1.1 per cent, to 24,579 points.
The rally was driven by buying in shares that had recently weakened, after the release of US employment data that showed 165,000 non-farm jobs were added in October, far exceeding expectations, while the unemployment rate unexpectedly fell to 4.1 per cent. Markets increased their bets on a Federal Reserve rate hike next month.
The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index jumped more than 4 per cent. Chip, optical communications and AI-related stocks mostly rose. Intel, AMD and Coherent gained between nearly 8 per cent and nearly 14 per cent. SpaceX rose nearly 9 per cent, while Nvidia added nearly 3 per cent.
Some tech stocks remained under pressure. Apple and Microsoft each fell less than 1 per cent. Seagate Technology and Western Digital declined more than 1 per cent. Financial and consumer stocks were mostly soft.
All three major indices posted weekly losses. The Dow fell more than 0.9 per cent, its second consecutive weekly decline. The S&P 500 and the Nasdaq both fell for a fourth straight week, losing about 2.7 per cent and about 3.4 per cent respectively.