NEW YORK — Stocks ended higher Friday but tumbled for the week, sending the Dow average to its worst weekly loss since 2008, with investors alert to any sign of policy makers acting further to bolster the global economy.
“The fact that people are afraid to buy here but we’re not going lower, that’s a good sign,” said Marc Pado, U.S. market strategist at Cantor Fitzgerald. “Any good news in this market is all upside from here. So much bad news has already been baked into the cake, whether it’s our own dysfunctional government, the threat of the euro zone falling apart, our 10-year yield falling to an all-time low — all of this stuff is based on dire expectations.”
The Dow Jones industrial average rose 37.65 points Friday to end the day at 10,771.48 points, with 18 of its 30 components advancing. The blue-chips benchmark, however, took home a weekly loss of 6.4 percent — its worst weekly performance in both point and percentage terms since the period ended Oct. 10, 2008, near the peak of the recent U.S. financial crisis.
Off 6.5 percent from last Friday’s close, the Standard & Poor’s 500 added 6.87 points to 1,136.43 Friday.
Consumer discretionary shares were up the most, while the energy sector was the laggard among its industry groups.
Pado pointed to 1,120 as a level of support on the S&P 500, saying that when the index on Thursday fell to 1,120 or just below, “that’s where institutions stepped in, something we’ve seen time and time again in the last few months.”
The Nasdaq composite climbed 27.56 points, or 1.1 percent, to 2,483.23, leaving it off 5.3 percent from the week-ago close.
Crude-oil futures fell to $79.85 a barrel. Gold futures lost $101.90 to close at $1,639.80 an ounce — down 5.9 percent, the worst one-day percentage drop since June 2006.
Friday’s stock gains, which follow two days of hefty losses, came as G-20 officials said, after discussions in Washington, that they were committed to an international response to the troubles endangering the global economy.
