Wall St ends near flat, but financials climb with yields

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US stocks ended little changed on Friday as financials rose with bond yields, while news that President Donald Trump instructed aides to proceed with tariffs on about $200 billion of Chinese products limited gains.

The S&P financial index was up 0.7%, leading%age gains among sectors. Benchmark US Treasury yields rose above 3% earlier inside day but were last off those levels.

At once, the rate-sensitive S&P utilities index fell 0.5%.

A source accustomed to the White House decision also said the timing for activating the excess tariffs was unclear. The move came despite Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s tries to restart talks with Beijing.

“There are a number of headlines that have turn up, folk have been pretty active all week, and it’s Friday afternoon. You don’t genuinely wish to add additional risk after you don’t understand what news might hit over the weekend,” said Michael O’Rourke, chief market strategist at JonesTrading in Greenwich, Connecticut.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 8.68 points, or 0.03%, to 26 154.67, the S&P 500 gained 0.83 point, or 0.03%, to 2 905.01 and also the Nasdaq Composite dropped 3.67 points, or 0.05%, to eight 010.04.

For the week, the Dow was up 0.9%, the S&P 500 was up 1.2% and also the Nasdaq rose 1.4%.

Also weighing on utilities was NiSource, which tumbled 11.7% after fire investigators said they suspected one on the company, Columbia Gas, was linked with a number of gas explosions in Boston suburbs on Thursday.

Shares of insurer Travelers were up 0.9% as analysts cut loss estimates from Hurricane Florence as being the storm weakened.

Walmart lost 0.6% after Goldman Sachs raised questions surrounding the buying of a number stake in India’s Flipkart.

Adobe Systems rose 2.3%, each day as soon as the company topped quarterly revenue and profit expectations.

Advancing issues outnumbered declining ones for the NYSE by way of 1.04-to-1 ratio; on Nasdaq, single.12-to-1 ratio favored advancers.

The S&P 500 posted 51 new 52-week highs with no new lows; the Nasdaq Composite recorded 118 new highs and 68 new lows.

About 6.2 billion shares altered on US exchanges. That compares while using 6.1 billion daily average for the last 20 trading days, depending on Thomson Reuters data.?