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2-month figures balance in S&P

NEW YORK - After two months, the stock market is back where it started. The Standard & Poor's 500 index rose 4.3 percent in February, helped by strong corporate earnings and a Federal Reserve that seems to have Wall Street's back at every turn. But the rise in February must be taken in the context that investors spent the month making up the ground they lost in January.

    by By Ken Sweet, Associated Press, Inquirer
    Published 

NEW YORK - After two months, the stock market is back where it started.

The Standard & Poor's 500 index rose 4.3 percent in February, helped by strong corporate earnings and a Federal Reserve that seems to have Wall Street's back at every turn. But the rise in February must be taken in the context that investors spent the month making up the ground they lost in January.

On Friday, the S&P 500 rose 5.16 points, or 0.28 percent, to 1,859.45. It was the second all-time closing high for the S&P 500 in a row. The S&P 500 is now up 0.6 percent for the year.

The Dow Jones industrial average rose 49.06 points, or 0.30 percent, to 16,321.71. The Nasdaq composite lost 10.81 points, or 0.25 percent, to 4,308.12.

"Safe-haven" utilities and health-care stocks are the biggest gainers so far this year. Utilities are up 5.7 percent in 2014 and health care is up 6.6 percent.

Investor caution was also evident in the bond market, which has done reasonably well in the last two months. The yield on the benchmark U.S. 10-year Treasury note has fallen from 2.97 percent to 2.65 percent in the last two months as investors returned to the relative safety of government debt.

February's rise came in spite of several economic reports that showed the U.S. economy slowed in the previous month.

It started with the January jobs report, which showed employers only created 113,000 jobs that month. It was far fewer than economists had expected. Other economic reports told a similar story. Consumer confidence, manufacturing and the housing market all fell sharply in January.

Investors blamed the weather, and rightly so. Many companies, particularly retailers, said winter storms of the last two months dramatically affected their business.