STORY: U.S. stocks ended mixed on Friday, with the Dow notching a record closing high and all three indexes logging their third straight week of gains.
The Dow climbed a third of a percent, the S&P 500 closed slightly lower and the Nasdaq ended down about four tenths of a percent.
Data from the Commerce Department showed inflation pressures continued to ease last month, which pushed traders’ bets of another half percentage point rate cut by the Federal Reserve in November to more than 50%, according to CME’s FedWatch tool.
The Russell 2000 index, which tracks small caps that fare better in a low-rate environment, climbed to a one-week high.
But Jason Browne, president of Alexis Investment Partners, said he isn’t ready to buy into them just yet.
“What we don’t like as much about small caps, specifically, is there’s been a lot, in our opinion, of potential misallocation of capital with the easy money of the last several years. And even though we’re now seeing some easing that typically is favorable to small caps, there’s a huge percentage of unprofitable names, and there’s a lot of areas there where we still think there’s some work to be done that might prove a little bit painful.”
Weighing on the Nasdaq Friday were shares of Nvidia, which fell 2%.
Other movers included shares of Bristol-Myers Squibb, which added more than one-and-a-half percent after the U.S. FDA approved its schizophrenia drug.
And shares of Costco fell after the wholesale company posted downbeat fourth-quarter revenue.
