Wall Street added to its recent gains Friday with a broad rally that broke the market’s three-week losing streak.
The S&P 500 closed 1.5% higher, its third straight increase, and ended with a 3.7% gain for the week. That makes it the benchmark index’s best week going back to July.
Big gains for technology companies pushed the Nasdaq composite to a 2.1% gain, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 1.2%. Both indexes also notched their first weekly gain in four weeks.
The latest gains punctuated a holiday-shortened week of trading on Wall Street during which the market regained some of the ground it lost after a mid-August slump that wiped away much of the gains from a mid-summer rally.
A weaker dollar and a reversal among short-sellers — traders who bet that the market will go lower — appeared to be responsible for some of the rally Friday, said Sameer Samana, senior global market strategist at Wells Fargo Investment Institute.
“You had a little bit of a positive catalyst in the dollar coming off today, and lo and behold that extreme positioning had to kind of be unwound,” he said. “We probably wouldn’t read too much into it. For us, anyway, the trend in (stocks) remains lower.”
The S&P 500 rose 61.18 points to 4,067.36. The index is still down about 15% so far this year.
The Dow added 377.19 points to 32,151.71, while the Nasdaq rose 250.18 points to 12,112.31.
Technology stocks and retailers had some of the biggest gains. Microsoft rose 2.3% and Amazon rose 2.7%.
DocuSign jumped 10.5% after the electronic signature company reported strong second-quarter sales and raised its subscription forecast.
Bond yields mostly rose. The yield on the 10-year Treasury, which influences interest rates on mortgages and other loans, slipped to 3.31 from 3.33% late Thursday. The two-year Treasury yield, which tends to track expectations for actions by the Federal Reserve, rose to 3.57% from 3.51%.