NEW YORK — U.S. stocks ended higher Friday after waging a dramatic comeback in the final hour of trade, spurred by gains in commodities.
“It’s less driven by an influx of bargain hunters and more the exhaustion of sellers,” Art Hogan, chief market strategist at Jefferies & Co., said of the late surge.
Reversing course after a nearly 170-point drop earlier, the Dow Jones industrial average added 10.05 points, or 0.1 percent, to 10,012.23, leaving the blue chips with a 0.5 percent weekly loss.
The S&P 500 index gained 3.08 points, or 0.3 percent, to 1,066.19, down 0.7 percent for the week.
The Nasdaq composite index rose 15.69 points, or 0.7 percent, to 2,141.12, leaving it off 0.3 percent from the week-ago close.
The market was beset through most of the session by concerns about the creditworthiness of European governments.
With an hour of trading left, the market started to shift alongside a rebound in oil prices in electronic trading and a better-than-expected reading of U.S. consumer credit.
“The sovereign debt story will play out for a long time, but the U.S. market has over-reacted and is now back in lockstep with the dollar and commodities,” Hogan said.
Traders also said automated orders seemed to kick in late in the day, as sometimes happens in the last hour of trading. After an increasingly volatile run lately, including a sharp two-day pullback coming into Friday’s trading, the market has become an increasingly attractive playground for short-term participants who use such computer-based orders.
The Dow saw three triple-digit full-day point moves last week. The performance has frustrated traders who focus on earnings and big-picture U.S. data, which have been overshadowed lately by concerns about economic policy in major industrialized countries.
In U.S. economic news, a much-anticipated employment report was better than some investors had feared. The U.S. unemployment rate unexpectedly fell to 9.7 percent last month from an unrevised 10 percent in December, the Labor Department said. Economists expected the jobless rate to edge higher, to 10.1 percent.
Still, the jobs data didn’t point unequivocally to a strengthening labor market as the number of workers on nonfarm payrolls continued to edge lower.
“The real impetus is that the economy is not off to the races,” said David Klaskin, chief investment officer of Oak Ridge Investments. “Even though we’ve had some really nice data points, they don’t necessarily reflect a prolonged recovery.”
Concerns have swirled in the past few days regarding the financing of governments in Greece, Portugal and Spain. The potential that European banks could announce further problems with funding or real-estate loans prompted traders to clear their portfolios of risky assets before the market closed.
