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| Stocks end strong week on flat note | Stocks end strong week on flat note |
| (35 minutes later) | |
| NEW YORK — Stocks ended a strong week on a flat note as lower oil prices and utility stocks offset encouraging economic news. | NEW YORK — Stocks ended a strong week on a flat note as lower oil prices and utility stocks offset encouraging economic news. |
| Still, the market ended Friday with a second straight weekly gain. | Still, the market ended Friday with a second straight weekly gain. |
| The Dow Jones industrial average closed down 57.32 points, or 0.3 percent, to 16,639.97. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index lost 3.65 points, or 0.2 percent, to 1,948.05 and the Nasdaq composite added 8.27 points, or 0.2 percent, to 4,590.47. | |
| All three indexes finished the week up by 1.5 percent or more. Oil, despite Friday’s decline, was up 3.6 percent for the week. | |
| On Friday the market was buoyed early by a strong rally in overseas stocks triggered by word from China that it would not devalue its currency to make its imports more competitive. | |
| Also, the Commerce Department said U.S. gross domestic product, the broadest measure of economic health, grew at an annual rate of 1 percent in the fourth quarter, an improvement from the first estimate of 0.7 percent. Economists were expecting a reading of 0.4 percent growth. | |
| “We are finally seeing some stabilization in the economic data — durable goods numbers, retail sales, and this second reading on GDP — that will hopefully end this debate on whether the U.S. economy is heading toward recession,” said Quincy Krosby, a market strategist with Prudential Financial. | |
| But the stronger economic news kicked interest rates up sharply. | |
| Voya Market Strategists Douglas Cote and Karyn Cavanaugh, in a note to investors, said the GDP data could increase the likelihood of an interest rate increase at the Federal Reserve’s meeting in March. | |
| This sentiment and the rising rates hit relatively safe investments like government bonds and stocks that are attractive for their dividends, like utilities, hard. | |
| The Dow Jones utility index, a basket of 15 utility companies, fell nearly 3 percent. Utility stocks tend to do better at times of low interest rates or economic uncertainty because their business is relatively stable and they pay a high dividend. | |
| Government bond prices fell, pushing the yield on the 10-year Treasury note up to 1.76 percent from 1.72 percent the day before. Gold prices also fell, closing down $18.40 to $1,220.40 an ounce. | |
| Oil was unable to hold gains it had early in the day, and closed down 29 cents, or 1 percent, to $32.78. In other energy commodities, heating oil fell 1.8 cents to $1.067 a gallon. Wholesale gasoline futures fell 1.7 cents to $1.295 a gallon and natural gas rose 0.6 cents to $1.791 per thousand cubic feet. | |
| In other metals, silver fell 49 cents to $14.71 an ounce and high-grade copper rose 5 cents to $2.125 a pound. | |
| Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. | Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. |