Wall Street ended mostly higher Friday, with the major benchmarks posting strong weekly gains and a strong finish to August.
Tonight though, Wall Street is closed for the start of trading in the new month because of the three-day Labor Day weekend.
We can expect to see investors and others start returning from their summer breaks from Tuesday, with volumes quickly picking up and with probably a bit more instability, especially if President Trump gets into a trade fight with Canada and China, which could very well be on the cards.
On Friday the Dow Jones Industrial Average ended down 22.10 points to 25,964.82, a fall of less than 0.1%, but finished well off its lows for the session.
The S&P 500 index ended the day virtually flat, with a gain of less than a point to 2,901.52, while the Nasdaq Composite Index rose 21.17 points, or 0.3%, to close at 8,109.54.
The S&P 500 ended last week 0.9% higher, for its third straight weekly gain; the Nasdaq was up 2.1% and the Dow was up about 0.6%.
Much of the gains on Nasdaq have come from the record rally for shares of Apple, much of which has been powered by a huge buyback, but also by concerted buying by Warren Buffett.
Buffett told CNBC that he had bought more Apple shares in recent weeks, saying in an interview on CNBC on Thursday that he had bought “just a little” more of Apple.
Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway revealed in a quarterly regulatory filing earlier this month that it had bought 12.4 million shares of Apple in the second quarter to a total of nearly 252 million shares as of June 30.
Apple shares rose 1.1% on Friday to close at $US227.93 for a gain of 5.3% for the week and 9.5% in August.
For August, the S&P 500 was up 3%, its fifth consecutive monthly gain. The Dow added 2.1% in August for a back-to-back monthly gain, but the Nasdaq surged 5.7% in its largest monthly advance since January.
