NEW YORK - Investors were looking for any reason to look past the winter weather that has hampered the U.S. economy in the last few weeks, and they found it.
Stocks mostly rose Thursday, helped by a report that showed the number of people who filed for unemployment benefits fell last week to the lowest level in three months. The gains were enough to give the Standard & Poor’s 500 index its third all-time high this week.
The S&P 500 rose 3.22 points, or 0.2 percent, to 1,877.03. The Dow Jones industrial average rose 61.71 points, or 0.4 percent, to 16,421.89. The Nasdaq composite fell 5.85 points, or 0.1 percent, to 4,352.13.
The report on unemployment claims was one of the first bits of good news investors have gotten on the economy, after weeks of data that painted a picture of a U.S. economic recovery that was slowing down because of the severe winter weather that has hit much of the country.
“Investors are putting more weight on the data that makes sense and ignoring the data that was impacted by the harsh winter weather,” said Kate Warne, a market strategist with Edward Jones.
Staples fell the most of any stock in the S&P 500 after the office supplies company said it would close 12 percent of its stores because nearly half of its sales are now generated online. Staples’ shares fell $2.05, or 15 percent, to $11.35.
Staples is the second major retailer to announce large scale store closures this week.Two days ago RadioShack said it would close as many as 1,100 locations as part of a restructuring.
The number of people who filed for unemployment benefits fell by 26,000 last week to 323,000, according to the Labor Department. That was far less than the 337,000 claims economists had expected, according to FactSet, and a sign that fewer people are being laid off.
Typically investors would not put much weight in the weekly unemployment report, because the numbers can be volatile. But with the rest of the data investors typically have at their disposal tainted by the weather, including today’s closely watched monthly government jobs report, investors don’t have much to work with at the moment.
The figures for weekly unemployment claims coming up over the next several weeks will be the freshest data investors will have, strategists said.
“We won’t get a clean reading on the economy until we get through this bad weather,” said Quincy Krosby, a market strategist at Prudential Financial.
Expectations for the February job numbers are low. Economists expect employers added 145,000 jobs last month and that the unemployment rate held steady at 6.6 percent. Before the bad winter weather hit much of the country starting in December, the U.S. economy was creating around 225,000 jobs a month.
Outside the U.S., investors remained concerned about Ukraine, where tensions have been escalating over Russia’s deployment of troops to Ukraine’s Crimea Peninsula.
Moscow-backed Crimean officials said Thursday that the region would hold a referendum to decide whether it should be annexed by Russia. President Barack Obama declared that the referendum would violate international law.
In other markets, bond prices fell. The yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury note rose to 2.73 percent from 2.71 percent Wednesday. Gold rose $11.50 to $1,351.80 an ounce. Gold has risen 2 percent this week as the tensions in Ukraine escalated.
Business, Pages 28 on 03/07/2014