It wasn't the most thrilling ride on Friday, yet the stock market maintained its bullish bias and ended the week on a winning note. Both the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500 registered new record highs. Additionally, the S&P 500 logged its seventh consecutive winning week.
There was a modicum of profit-taking interest early on after Intel (INTC 23.87, -1.36) issued a warning that its revenue in FY14 is expected to be flat, but it didn't take long at all for the broader market to regain its footing.
Participants just stayed with the trade that got them here, buying the dip and keeping sellers at bay. They also appeared to draw support from the reminder out of Atlanta Fed President Lockhart before the open that monetary policy is likely to be accommodative for many more years.
Strikingly, there wasn't a lot of conviction behind today's trading. Volume at the NYSE totaled just 607 mln shares, which was the lowest all week and well below recent averages. Even so, today's trading was notable more for the lack of selling interest than buying interest.
Following a 9.0% gain in the last three months, there simply wasn't any rush to take profits. The buying interest seen was fairly broad-based. Advancers outlegged decliners at the NYSE and Nasdaq by roughly a 3-to-2 margin and seven out of ten sectors ended the day higher.
The health care sector (+1.2%) led the way, fueled by a huge jump in Biogen-Idec (BIIB 285.58, +33.15), which surged 13% after EU regulators approved its treatment for multiple sclerosis. Buying efforts were more restrained elsewhere as the gains in other sectors ranged from 0.5-0.8%.
The only laggards today were the utilities (-0.04%), telecom services (-0.1%), and technology (-0.2%) sectors, but even their losses were fairly negligible.
Within the Dow, 23 of the 30 components finished higher. Boeing (BA 135.97, +3.04) had the biggest gain and also some outsized influence on the price-weighted average. Some of its gain was offset by IBM (IBM 181.24, 2.89), which famous money Stanley Druckenmiller said was a stock to sell short for the company's lack of innovation.
Despite the weakness in IBM and Intel, the Dow and the other major averages closed at, or very near, their best levels of the day. The same can be said for longer-dated Treasury instruments. The benchmark 10-yr note added ten ticks, lowering its yield to 2.75%, while the 30-yr bond gained nearly a point and saw its yield come down to 3.84%.
If the market is concerned about the Fed tapering its asset purchases soon, it certainly didn't show it on Friday.