Most US stocks ticked higher on Friday, sending Wall Street to more records despite the federal government's shutdown and the lack of an expected monthly jobs report.
- The Dow rose 238.56 points, or 0.5%, to 46,758.28, ending the week up 1.1%.
- The S&P 500 rose 0.44 points, or less than 0.1%, to 6,715.79, finishing the week 1.1% higher.
- The Nasdaq fell 63.54 points, or 0.3%, to 22,780.51, closing out the week up 1.3%.
Data such as the jobs report is particularly important now, the AP reports, given how much on Wall Street is riding on the expectation that the job market is continuing to slow by enough to get the Federal Reserve to keep cutting interest rates. But the shutdown, now in its third day, is delaying the release. So far, the US stock market has looked past such delays, including Thursday's scheduled report on unemployment claims. That leaves excitement around artificial intelligence and the massive spending underway because of it as one of the main drivers of the US stock market, which has been setting record after record.
The industry got another boost after Japan's Hitachi signed a memorandum of understanding with OpenAI related to powering AI. It followed an earlier set of announcements by OpenAI with South Korean companies, which vaulted stock prices higher there. On Wall Street, Nvidia dipped 0.7%. Applied Materials fell 2.7%. But gains for oil producers helped offset such losses. Exxon Mobil climbed 1.8%, and Diamondback Energy rose 3% as the price of crude clawed back some of its sharp losses from earlier in the week. Oil prices had been struggling on worries that the amount of crude in inventories will be too high relative to demand.
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