NEW YORK — With Wall Street focused on the debut of Alibaba Group, the stock market drifted into the weekend and major indexes ended little changed.
Investors watched as the Chinese e-commerce giant surged 38 percent Friday, in its first day of trading on the New York Stock Exchange. Alibaba gained $25.89 to end at $93.89.
By the end of the day, the Standard & Poor’s 500 index fell less than a point, a sliver of a percent, to 2,010.40.
Alibaba lined up its initial public offering of stock at $68 a share the day before, raising $21.8 billion from investors. That vaulted Alibaba to the top tier of technology companies in terms of market value. It’s bigger than but smaller than the titans of tech, Apple and Google.
“We know there’s a lot of demand from institutional and retail investors, so it’s not a surprise to see it rally that quickly,” said JJ Kina-han, chief strategist at TD Ameritrade, the online brokerage.
Alibaba was the big story Friday, but the rest of the week belonged to the Federal Reserve. At the end of a two-day meeting on Wednesday, the Fed issued a statement saying that it planned to keep its benchmark lending rate low.
“Janet Yellen (the Fed’s chairwoman) told people exactly what they wanted to hear,” Kinahan said.
Encouraged, investors sent stocks to record highs this week. The S&P 500 index has now climbed 9 percent in 2014, better than the average gain for a full year.
In other trading Friday, the Dow Jones industrial average edged up 13.75 points, or 0.1 percent, to close at 17,279.74. The Nasdaq composite fell 13.64 points, or 0.3 percent, to 4,579.79.
