Stock market today: Amazon helps pull Wall Street higher, while yields skid after jobs report

NEW YORK -- NEW YORK (AP) — Amazon and oil-and-gas companies are helping to pull U.S. stock indexes higher on Friday, while yields skid in the bond market following a surprisingly weak jobs report that was marred by hurricanes and other unusual occurrences.

The S&P 500 was 0.6% higher in early trading and recovering some of its worst loss in eight weeks from the day before. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 280 points, or 0.7%, as of 9:35 a.m. Eastern time, while the Nasdaq composite was 0.6% higher.

Amazon rallied 6.2% after delivering a stronger profit for the latest quarter than analysts expected. Chevron jumped 4%, and rival Exxon Mobil climbed 1.8% and were likewise among the strongest forces pushing upward on the S&P 500 after beating profit expectations for the summer.

Intel, meanwhile, climbed 2.7% despite reporting a worse loss than expected. Its revenue topped analysts’ estimates, and it gave a forecast for results in the current quarter that likewise topped expectations.

They helped offset a 1.6% slide for Apple, which said it expects revenue growth in the important holiday quarter to be in the low to mid-single digit percentages. That was below several analysts’ forecasts.

In the bond market, Treasury yields tumbled after a highly anticipated report said U.S. employers added only a net 12,000 workers to their payrolls last month. That was far short of the 115,000 in hiring that economists were expecting or the 223,00 jobs that employers created in September.

The shortfall was so deep that traders swung some bets toward the Federal Reserve cutting its main interest rate by a larger-than-usual half a percentage point at its next meeting.

The widespread expectation on Wall Street is still that the Fed will cut by the traditional size of a quarter of a percentage point next week. But the weaker-than-expected jobs report wiped out the small probability traders saw of the Fed possibly holding rates steady, according to data from CME Group.

The Fed kicked off its rate-cutting campaign in September with a larger-than-usual cut, as it turns more attention to keeping the job market solid instead of focusing on just driving inflation lower.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury fell to 4.26% from 4.29% late Thursday. The two-year Treasury yield, which more closely tracks expectations for the Fed, fell more sharply to 4.11% from 4.18%.

Economists, though, warned that the jobs report contained a lot of noise and perhaps not much signal. Besides the two hurricanes that left destructive paths across the United States during the month, a strike by workers at Boeing also helped depress the numbers.

All those distortions make the numbers difficult to parse, “but it doesn’t change our view that the labor market should further decelerate in coming months,” said Scott Wren, senior global market strategist at Wells Fargo Investment Institute.

The hope on Wall Street is that the economy will still avoid a recession, even if the job market continues to slow, thanks in part to coming cuts to rates by the Fed. It has so far remained more resilient than feared.

In stock markets abroad, indexes rose across much of Europe after finishing mixed in Asia.

The price of oil, meanwhile, rallied again to further trim its loss for the week. A barrel of benchmark U.S. crude rose 2.5% to $70.99 per barrel. Brent crude, the international standard, climbed 2.4% to $74.56 per barrel.

___

AP Writers Matt Ott and Zimo Zhong contributed.