Wall Street ends a bumpy week with a gain, led by technology

Associated Press | Friday, April 24, 2020 12:54 p.m.

A man wearing a mask to help stop the spread of the new coronavirus walks past an electronic stock board showing Japan’s Nikkei 225 and New York Dow indexes at a securities firm in Tokyo on Friday.

NEW YORK — Stocks are closing out a tumultuous week with broad gains, led by familar names in technology, including Apple.

The S&P 500 rose 1.4% Friday, but still ended the week lower, breaking a two-week winning streak.

Stocks meandered between gains and losses for much of the morning then rose steadily in the afternoon. The calm trading offered a soothing coda to what’s been a wild week.

From Monday’s astonishing plummet for oil to Thursday’s sudden disappearance of a morning stock rally, markets pinballed as the mood swung from fear to hope and back again amid the coronavirus pandemic.

“The market sort of feels like Dorothy coming to the crossroads and has yet to meet the scarecrow to tell her which way to go,” said Sam Stovall, chief investment strategist at CFRA.

Reports piled higher through the week showing the pandemic is bludgeoning the economy even more than economists had feared. It’s so severe that a heavily divided Congress has reached bipartisan agreement on massive support for the economy, and President Donald Trump signed a bill Friday to send another nearly $500 billion into the economy, including loans for small businesses and aid for hospitals.

The big question for markets is when the economy can reopen, said Mike Zigmont, head of trading and research at Harvest Volatility Management. Businesses can get by for a few months on government help, he said, but if the shutdown drags on longer than that they could be permanently damaged.

Many investors have essentially agreed to swallow horrific corporate profits and economic data in upcoming months — and potentially all of 2020 — and they’re turning their focus to who can survive and eventually grow their profits in the future.

Next week is scheduled to be one of the busiest of this earnings season, with more than 150 companies in the S&P 500 reporting how much they made during the first three months of the year. Many companies in recent weeks have pulled their profit forecasts entirely for 2020 given all the uncertainty with the pandemic, and Wall Street analysts are slashing their own estimates.

“I don’t really think that’s added to the concern of investors because they assume that companies will be doing a lot of writing down in this bad year so that 2021 could look even better,” said CFRA’s Stovall.