Wall Street’s best week of 2024 closes with indexes near their records

NEW YORK —  U.S. stocks closed out their best week of the year with more gains Friday and climbed to the cusp of their records.

The Standard & Poor’s 500 rose 0.5% for its fifth straight gain and is just 0.7% below its all-time high set in July. Rallies for Microsoft, Broadcom and other big technology stocks helped it claw back almost all its losses from last week, which was its worst in nearly 18 months.

The Dow Jones industrial average gained 0.7% and at one point got within 30 points of its record set last month. The Nasdaq composite added 0.7%.

Uber Technologies helped drive the market higher with a gain of 6.4% after saying it will bring autonomous ride-hailing to Austin, Texas, and Atlanta with Waymo early next year.

Stocks also got support from the bond market, where Treasury yields eased ahead of next week’s meeting of the Federal Reserve. The unanimous expectation on Wall Street is for the Fed to deliver the first interest rate cut in more than four years Wednesday, and traders are rekindling hopes it may offer bigger-than-usual relief.

The Federal Reserve has been keeping its main interest rate at a two-decade high in hopes of slowing the economy enough to stifle high inflation. With inflation having eased substantially from its peak two summers ago, the Fed has said it can turn more focus to bolstering the slowing job market and economy.

How much to cut rates by will be a delicate balancing act for the Fed: Lowering them relieves pressure on the economy but can also give inflation more fuel. Reports this week showed some underlying upward pressure may remain on inflation, which initially pushed traders to ratchet back expectations for the size of the Fed’s upcoming move.

On Friday, though, traders were seeing roughly a coin flip’s chance that the Fed will deliver a large cut of half a percentage point, instead of the more traditional quarter of a point, according to data from CME Group. The federal funds rate is sitting in a range of 5.25% to 5.50%.

“Right now, the equity market is keying off the toss-up” in the size of the Fed’s cut next week “and would probably be fine with either,” said Sameer Samana, senior global market strategist at Wells Fargo Investment Institute.

“They care more about direction than magnitude, and rates falling should take pressure” off companies’ expenses and stock prices, he said.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury eased to 3.65% from 3.68% late Thursday. The two-year yield, which more closely tracks expectations for Fed action, fell more sharply to 3.58% from 3.65%.

On Wall Street, home-furnishings company RH jumped 25.5% after reporting stronger-than-expected profit and revenue for the latest quarter. The company said demand has been gaining momentum each month “despite operating in the most challenging housing market in three decades.”

The housing market has been contending with high mortgage rates, though they’ve been easing since the spring on expectations for coming rate cuts. Shoppers have also generally been beaten down as prices continue to rise across the economy, though a preliminary reading on U.S. consumer sentiment Friday came in better than economists expected.

Oracle pared a big early gain to inch up 0.4% after giving long-term financial forecasts that analysts said topped their expectations. That brought the software company’s gain to 14.3% for the week, which it began with a better-than-expected profit report for the latest quarter.

Technology stocks were generally the market’s main drivers this week, particularly Nvidia and other big technology stocks that struggled earlier this summer on concerns their prices had shot too high in the frenzy around artificial intelligence. Nvidia rallied 15.8% over the week despite slipping 0.1% on Friday.

On the losing end of Wall Street on Friday was Boeing, which lost 3.7% as aircraft assembly workers walked off the job. Union members voted overwhelmingly to go on strike and reject the troubled aerospace giant’s tentative contract that would have increased wages by 25% over four years.

Adobe fell 8.5%, even though the company also reported better-than-expected profit for the latest quarter. Analysts said investors were more focused on its financial forecasts for the current quarter, when some trends looked to be falling short of expectations.

All told, the S&P 500 rose 30.26 points to 5,626.02. The Dow climbed 297.01 points to 41,393.78, and the Nasdaq composite added 114.30 points to close at 17,683.98.

In stock markets abroad, indexes rose in Europe after finishing mixed in Asia.

Choe writes for the Associated Press. AP writers Matt Ott and Zimo Zhong contributed to this report.