Stock market today: Amazon’s surge leads a rally on Wall Street

AP Business Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — Amazon is leading a rally for U.S. stock indexes on Friday, while a surprisingly weak jobs report marred by some unusual occurrences is cementing bets on Wall Street for another cut to interest rates next week.

The S&P 500 was 1.1% higher in midday trading and recovering more than half its loss from the day before, which was its worst in eight weeks. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 558 points, or 1.3%, as of 11:30 a.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 1.5% higher.

Amazon climbed 7.2% after delivering a stronger profit for the latest quarter than analysts expected and was the strongest force pushing the S&P 500 higher.

Intel, meanwhile, rallied 8.4% despite reporting a worse loss than expected. Its revenue topped analysts’ estimates, and it gave a forecast for results in the current quarter that likewise topped expectations. Cardinal Health was another one of the market’s bigger gains and jumped 7.3% after topping analysts’ forecasts for profit and revenue in the latest quarter. It also raised its profit forecast for its fiscal year, which is only in its second quarter.

They helped offset a 1.2% slide for Apple, which said it expects revenue growth in the important holiday quarter to be in the low to mid-single digit percentages. That was below several analysts’ forecasts.

In the bond market, Treasury yields were mixed after a highly anticipated report said U.S. employers added only a net 12,000 workers to their payrolls last month. That was far short of the 115,000 in hiring that economists were expecting or the 223,00 jobs that employers created in September.

The nearly unanimous expectation on Wall Street is still for the Federal Reserve to cut its main interest rate by the traditional size of a quarter of a percentage point next week. But the weaker-than-expected jobs report nearly wiped out the slim chance traders had been seeing of the Fed holding rates steady, according to data from CME Group.

The Fed kicked off its rate-cutting campaign in September with a larger-than-usual cut, as it turns more attention to keeping the job market solid instead of focusing on just driving inflation lower.

The two-year Treasury yield, which closely tracks expectations for the Fed’s actions, edged down to 4.16% from 4.18% late Thursday.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury, which also takes future economic growth and other factors into account, initially fell after the jobs report and then recouped losses. It eventually rose to 4.32%, up from 4.29% late Thursday.

Economists said Friday’s jobs report contained a lot of noise and perhaps not much signal. Besides two hurricanes that left destructive paths across the United States during the month, a strike by workers at Boeing also helped depress the numbers.

All those distortions make the numbers difficult to parse, “but it doesn’t change our view that the labor market should further decelerate in coming months,” said Scott Wren, senior global market strategist at Wells Fargo Investment Institute.

The hope on Wall Street is that the economy will still avoid a recession, even with that expected slowdown inthe job market, thanks in part to coming cuts to rates by the Fed. The overall economy has so far remained more resilient than feared.

A separate report on Friday said U.S. manufacturing contracted by more last month than economists expected. It’s been one of the areas of the economy hurt most by the Fed’s keeping interest rates at a two-decade high until September.

In stock markets abroad, indexes rose across much of Europe after finishing lower across much of Asia outside of Hong Kong.

The price of oil, meanwhile, rallied again to further trim its loss for the week. A barrel of benchmark U.S. crude rose 1.3% to $70.15 per barrel. Brent crude, the international standard, climbed 1.3% to $73.77 per barrel.

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AP Writers Matt Ott and Zimo Zhong contributed.