Angela Moon
Reuters
March 7, 2014
U.S. stocks trimmed earlier gains on Friday’s jobs data to trade little changed by midday as investors turned cautious before the weekend, with the S&P 500 near record highs and a simmering crisis in Ukraine.
The S&P 500 climbed to an intraday record high shortly after the opening bell, lifted by the government’s report showing that U.S. employers added 175,000 jobs to their payrolls in February. The consensus forecast was for a gain of 149,000 jobs, according to economists polled by Reuters. The unemployment rate, however, edged up to 6.7 percent in February from a five-year low of 6.6 percent in January.
“It seems that the decent February employment report, although a step in the right direction, has resolved little,” said Andrew Wilkinson, chief market analyst at Interactive Brokers LLC in Greenwich, Connecticut.
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