Stock Market Today: Nasdaq Bounces 1.09 Percent at Friday's Close, the Dow Slips, and Wall Street Ends Its Worst Week Since June
Friday's close split the market in two. Chip stocks pulled the Nasdaq up 1.09 percent to 24,579.42 and the S&P 500 up 0.31 percent to 7,376.86, while the Dow fell 0.46 percent to 51,285.73 - a relief bounce inside a brutal week: the S&P lost 2.68 percent, its worst week since June, after Thursday's 5.5 percent Nasdaq plunge into correction territory.
Wall Street closed its worst week since June with a bounce that did not change the week's story. The Nasdaq Composite rose 264.43 points, or 1.09 percent, to 24,579.42 on Friday, and the S&P 500 added 23.13 points, or 0.31 percent, to close at 7,376.86, as buyers returned to the chip stocks Thursday had routed - the semiconductor fund SMH rose 3.62 percent, AMD jumped 11.04 percent and Nvidia gained 2.78 percent. The Dow Jones Industrial Average went the other way, falling 237.33 points, or 0.46 percent, to 51,285.73, and the small-cap Russell 2000 rose 0.89 percent. Market fear cooled sharply: the VIX fell 9 percent to 25.64.
The week's arithmetic is the context. Even with Friday's bounce, the S&P 500 lost 2.68 percent on the week, the Nasdaq 3.37 percent and the Dow 0.94 percent - the S&P's worst week since June, a slide driven by Thursday, when the Nasdaq plunged 5.5 percent, its worst day in 19 months, and fell into correction territory on fears about limits to the AI data-center build-out. Friday's chip rebound, as CNBC's coverage put it, answered the question of whether Thursday was a verdict or an overreaction with 'a bit of both.'
The day's economic news cut against the bounce. October payrolls rose 165,000, far above the roughly 65,000 expected, and unemployment fell to 4.1 percent - a hot jobs report that pushed the market's priced chance of a December Federal Reserve rate hike to about 78 percent, up from about 67 percent on Thursday, and lifted the 10-year Treasury yield to 4.859 percent. Strong hiring is good news for workers; for a market hoping for cheaper money, it was the reason the Dow lagged while tech rallied.
The session's extremes told the same narrow story. Axon Enterprise fell 18.18 percent after missing third-quarter estimates and cutting its 2026 revenue guidance, and DraftKings dropped 21.30 percent, while a handful of earnings winners - Karman Holdings up 42 percent, Firefly Aerospace up 37 percent - carried the gainers' list. Breadth was negative, with 297 S&P decliners against 202 advancers: a bounce concentrated in a narrow slice of the market, heading into a weekend with Berkshire Hathaway's results on Saturday and the Treasury's note auctions opening the new week on Monday.
