S&P 500 closes at record high on housing sales, HP shares
The S&P 500 closed at a record high on Friday, buoyed by a rally in housing stocks after better-than-expected home sales and a jump in Hewlett-Packard shares a day after the personal computer maker said it would cut more jobs. The S&P 500 ended above 1,900, just below a record intraday high of 1,902.17 set on May 13 and above its record closing high of 1,897.45 the same day. Eight of the 10 S&P sector indexes ended higher for the day. The Dow Jones Transportation Average rose 0.8 percent to close at a record high, after hitting a lifetime intraday high of 7,995.39. Housing stocks ranked among the market's biggest outperformers, with the housing index up 1.9 percent. Big tech names like Apple Inc and Amazon lifted the Nasdaq and helped it outperform the broader market. Apple shares ended up 1.1 percent at USD 614.13. Amazon shares jumped 2.4 percent to USD 312.24. Hewlett-Packard jumped 6.1 percent to USD 33.72. The stock was among the S&P 500's best performers a day after the personal computer maker said it may cut as many as 16,000 more jobs in a major ramp-up of CEO Meg Whitman's years-long effort to turn the company around and relieve pressure on its profit margins. The CBOE Volatility Index, or VIX, fell 5.6 percent to end at 11.36, its lowest level since March 2013. Known as Wall Street's fear index, the VIX is extremely low by historical standards. The VIX, at those levels, shows investors' lack of anxiety and "a certain amount of complacency," said Donald Selkin, chief market strategist at National Securities in New York. "The lower the VIX, the more overbought the market gets, leaving it vulnerable to some kind of setback," Selkin said. The Dow Jones industrial average rose 63.19 points or 0.38 percent, to 16,606.27. The S&P 500 gained 8.04 points or 0.42 percent, to end at 1,900.53, a record. The Nasdaq Composite added 31.47 points or 0.76 percent, to 4,185.81. The S&P 500 posted its fifth daily advance out of the past six sessions, and its first weekly gain out of the past three. For the week, the Dow rose 0.7 percent, the S&P 500 jumped 1.2 percent and the Nasdaq gained 2.3 percent. A total of 146 stocks on the Big Board and Nasdaq touched 52-week highs, while just 26 issues hit 52-week lows. Two of the issues hitting 52-week lows on the Nasdaq are exchange-traded securities that track volatility.
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