Stocks Finish Week With Strong Gains – US-FOREX.US
Stocks took another breather on Friday, pausing amid a broad rally that has seen the major indexes gain 11% in the last two weeks. Many U.S. companies have posted better-than-expected second-quarter earnings reports so far. The week’s final session saw drug and energy stocks rise, countered by disappointing results from tech giants like Microsoft and Amazon.com.The Dow Jones industrial average gained 24 points, or 0.3%, to close at 9,093. The S&P 500 was up three points, or 0.3%, to end at 979; and the Nasdaq lost eight points, or 0.4%, to finish at 1,966. That left all three averages with strong gains for the week: The Dow rose 4%, the S&P 500 was up 4.1% and the Nasdaq posted a gain of 4.2%.Solar power company SunPower
beat analysts’ estimates and boosted its year-end forecast, sending shares up 29% on Friday. Shares of cellphone company Sprint
fell 3% after the firm’s chief said it was too soon to tell if the new Pre phone from Palm would be a hit for the third-largest carrier in the U.S. The new Pre phone is Palm’s attempt to reclaim the smart-phone market from BlackBerry maker Reasearch In Motion and Apple’s popular iPhone. Sprint also announced it would sell a phone based on Google’s Android operating system by the end of the year. Palm shares gained 2.2% on Friday.Troubled lender CIT Group
was again in the news as it tried to convince its creditors to accept 83 cents on the dollar for their bonds to help keep the firm, which lends to millions of small businesses, out of bankruptcy. Shares gained a penny, or 1.4%, to 75 cents. Commodity markets were quiet Friday, taking their cues from stocks, after joining equities in a solid rally over the past two weeks. Gold fell slightly to around 953 an ounce while copper was flat for the day. In the past two weeks, copper was up 14%, aluminum gained 14.8% and gold jumped 4.4%.
Crude oil gained modestly to close just over 68 a barrel after a strong week backed by corporate earnings and refinery outages. The U.S. Oil Fund
, an ETF that tracks oil pries, was up 43 cents, or 1.2%, to 36.22.Thomson Reuters and the Associated Press contributed to this report.