“The fact that people are afraid to buy here but we’re not going lower, that’s a good sign,” said Marc Pado, US market strategist at Cantor Fitzgerald.
“Any good news in this market is all upside from here,” he added.”So much bad news has already been baked into the cake, whether it’s our own dysfunctional government, the threat of the euro zone falling apart, our 10-year yield falling to an all-time low—all of this stuff is based on dire expectations.”
The Dow Jones industrial average rose 37.65 points to end the day at 10,771.48 points, with 18 of its 30 components advancing. The blue-chips benchmark, however, took home a weekly loss of 6.4 percent—its worst weekly performance in both point and percentage terms since the period ended on October 10, 2008, near the peak of the recent US financial crisis.
Off 6.5 percent from last Friday’s close, the Standard & Poor’s 500 index added 6.87 points to 1,136.43 on Friday. Consumer discretionary shares were up the most, while the energy sector was the laggard among its industry groups.
Pado pointed to 1,120 as a level of support on the S&P 500, saying that when the index on Thursday fell to 1,120 or just below, “that’s where institutions stepped in, something we’ve seen time and time again in the last few months.”
The Nasdaq composite index climbed 27.56 points, or 1.1 percent, to 2,483.23, leaving it off 5.3 percent from the week-ago close.
Crude-oil futures fell to $79.85 a barrel. Gold futures ended Friday’s session at $1,639.80 an ounce—down $101.90 an ounce, or 5.9 percent, the worst one-day percentage drop since June 2006.
Friday’s stock gains, which follow two days of hefty losses, came as G20 officials said, after discussions in Washington, that they were committed to an international response to the troubles endangering the global economy.
The Group of 20, the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the European Union are “all trying to verbally support the situation in Europe, using a little rhetoric going into the weekend,” Pado said.
