NEW YORK — Stocks ended a seesaw day with a modest gain Wednesday after investors found some pluses in retail earnings reports.
The Dow Jones industrial average and other major indexes fluctuated throughout the day before closing with slender gains.
There was little news to motivate investors a day after a stream of improving economic numbers restored some of their enthusiasm for stocks and sent the Dow up 104 points. But retailers continued reporting second-quarter earnings, and investors found a few positives.
Target missed analysts’ forecasts for its second-quarter revenue and offered a muted outlook for sales the rest of the year. But the company told analysts it hopes to offset that with higher sales of groceries and new discounts for credit-card holders. Target initially fell sharply, then recovered to a healthy advance.
The reports came a day after Wal-Mart and Home Depot issued numbers that were upbeat. Almost all the big retailers closed higher Wednesday. An exception was BJ’s Wholesale Club, which lowered its earnings outlook for the year. Its stock dropped.
The Dow rose 9.69, or 0.1 percent, to 10,415.54. The Standard & Poor’s 500 rose 1.62, or 0.2 percent, to 1,094.16. The Nasdaq composite rose 6.26, or 0.3 percent, to 2,215.70 Gainers were ahead of losers by 3 to 2 on the New York Stock Exchange.
Wednesday’s trading was muted, and that was to be expected after Tuesday’s advance and as the outlook for the economy remained unclear. Traders weren’t about to commit much more money to stocks.
And many traders weren’t at their desks.
“This is sort of a reflection of it being August, when most trading firms have a skeleton staff on hand. It’s going to be quiet for the next week or two,” said Robert Pavlik, chief market strategist at Banyan Partners LLC in New York.
John Stoltzfus, senior market strategist with Ticonderoga Securities in New York, said the market is increasingly dominated by a “What have you done for me lately?” attitude and responding to daily reports about the economy.
“We live from economic data point to economic data point,” he said. “That will probably continue at least until the end of the summer as we wait for some kind of catalyst that would give the market better definition.”
