Stock market today: Wall Street hangs near records as it closes another winning week
Stocks are hanging near their record heights
NEW YORK — U.S. stocks are hanging near record heights Friday, on track to close another winning week in their stunning rally since Halloween.
The S&P 500 was 0.3% higher in afternoon trading and could finish the day above the 5,000 level for the first time after briefly breaching it on Thursday. It’s heading for its 14th winning week in the last 15.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 129 points, or 0.3%, a day after setting its latest all-time high. The Nasdaq composite was 0.9% higher to pull within 0.8% of its record set in 2021, as of 12:20 p.m. Eastern time.
Wall Street’s rally got going with hopes that cooling inflation would get the Federal Reserve to dial down the pressure by cutting interest rates. Lately, such cuts look to be coming later than hoped because reports keep showing a remarkably solid economy. But that strength has in turn raised expectations for profits from companies, supporting stocks.
Cloudflare was the latest company to soar after reporting stronger profit than analysts expected for its latest quarter. The cloud-services company jumped 22.3% after it said it signed both its largest new customer and its largest renewal ever, despite an overall economic environment that “remains challenging to predict.”
Big Tech stocks were doing most of the market’s heavy lifting, as they’ve been for more than a year, in part on mania around artificial-intelligence technology. Nvidia, Microsoft and Amazon were three of the strongest forces lifting the S&P 500 after each rose at least 1%.
They helped offset a 2.8% drop for PepsiCo, which reported weaker revenue for the latest quarter than analysts expected. It said growth is slowing because customers are
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