Market Wrap For Friday, September 13: Markets Erase August Losses On Light Volume

After being hammered last month, markets finished the week out with huge gains. The Dow is the biggest winner, up more than three percent for the week.

Major Indexes

The Dow rose 75.42 points, or 0.49 percent to close at 15,376.06. The S&P 500 added 4.57 points, or 0.27 percent to close at 1,687.99. The Nasdaq gained 6.21 points, or 0.17 percent to finish the day at 3,722.18. The Russell 3000 rose 1.66 points, or 0.17 percent to end at 1,010.31.

Top Stories

After the closing bell yesterday Twitter announced its plans for an IPO.

Facebook FB investors were a little frightened as their shares were down 1.14 percent heading into the close.

University of Michigan consumer sentiment came out Friday morning at 76.8. This is a huge disappointment; analysts were expecting 82 and the previous reading was 82.1. The advanced retail sales metric was also a big disappointment. Leading economists expected the August’s growth to be 0.5 percent, compared to the actual 0.2 percent.

Likewise, July saw 0.2 percent growth. Stock Movers Ulta Salon ULTA shot up, gaining 17.37 percent to $117.53, after the company reported upbeat results.

Stock Movers

United Natural Foods UNFI was also up 12.94 percent to $67.73, after the company reported a 28% rise in its fiscal fourth quarter.

ViroPharma VPHM was up as well, gaining 28.42 percent to $39.13 after the company got a gleaming report from Deutsche Bank this morning saying shares were worth $52.

Avanir Pharmaceuticals AVNR was down 18.24 percent to $4.08 after Gravity Research took aim at the company on Wednesday while analyst defences of the company yesterday did little for its shares on today's session.

Stratasys SSYS was down 5.83 percent to $92.09 after the company priced 4.5 million shares of ordinary shares at $92.09 per share.

Commodities

After sliding down yesterday, oil was mostly unchanged for the day. Brent added 0.13 percent to $112.78 and WTI fell 0.25 percent to $108.33. Natural gas made a bigger swing, rising 1.15 percent to $3.68.

Precious metals continued their downward spin today with gold futures down 0.99 percent to $1,317.40. Silver futures sold off 0.27 percent to $22.09.

Currencies

The United States dollar was mostly unchanged for the day with the PowerShares ETF UUP that tracks the dollar versus a basket of foreign currencies down 0.09 percent. The closely watched EUR/USD pair was up 0.03 percent to $1.3303. Although currencies were largely unchanged for the day, other significant movers include the GBP/USD couple which rose 0.44 percent, and the AUD/JPY pair which dropped 0.54 percent.

Volume and Volatility

Volume was especially light today as Yom Kippur begins at sundown. Only 60 million shares of the SPDR S&P 500 ETF SPY traded hands today, compared to the three month average of 125 million. The CBOE measure of volatility (VIX) was up 0.63 percent heading into the final bell. The metric is down almost ten percent for the week.