Wall Street finishes its winning week with more records

Most stocks ticked higher on Friday, sending Wall Street to more records.

The S&P 500 edged up by less than 0.1% to close out its seventh winning week in the last nine, and the Dow Jones industrial average climbed 238 points, or 0.5%. Both added to their all-time highs set the day before. The Nasdaq composite lost an early gain and slipped 0.3% from its own record.

Usually, the first Friday of each month has Wall Street transfixed on the monthly jobs update that the U.S. government publishes. It shows how many jobs employers created and destroyed, while also updating the unemployment rate.

Such data are particularly important now, given how much on Wall Street is riding on the expectation that the job market is continuing to slow by enough to get the Federal Reserve to keep cutting interest rates. But the shutdown of the U.S. government is delaying the release.

So far, the U.S. stock market has looked past such delays, including Thursday’s scheduled report on unemployment claims.

Past shutdowns of the U.S. government have tended not to hurt the economy or stock market much, and the thinking is that this one could be similar, even if President Trump has threatened large-scale firings of federal workers this time around.

That leaves excitement around artificial intelligence and the massive spending underway because of it as one of the main drivers of the U.S. stock market, which has been setting record after record.

The industry got another boost after Japan’s Hitachi signed a memorandum of understanding with OpenAI related to powering AI. It followed an earlier set of announcements by OpenAI with South Korean companies, which vaulted stock prices higher there. Hitachi’s stock jumped 10.3% in Tokyo.

AI stocks have become so dominant, and so much money has poured into the industry that worries are rising about a potential bubble that could eventually lead to disappointment for investors.

Nvidia, the stock that’s become the poster child of the AI boom, lost an early gain during the morning to finish with a dip of 0.7%.

Applied Materials fell 2.7%. The company, whose equipment helps make semiconductor chips, said it will take a roughly $110-million hit to its revenue in the fourth quarter because of a new Commerce Department rule expanding export restrictions to certain customers based in China.

But gains for oil producers helped offset such losses. Exxon Mobil climbed 1.8%, and Diamondback Energy rose 3% as the price of crude clawed back some of its sharp losses from earlier in the week. Oil prices had been struggling on worries that the amount of crude in inventories will be too high relative to demand.

Entergy climbed 1.9% after saying its Arkansas business will deliver power for Google’s planned $4-billion investment in the state, including a new data center.

All told, the S&P 500 added 0.44 to 6,715.79 points. The Dow Jones industrial average climbed 238.56 to 46,758.28, and the Nasdaq composite fell 63.54 to 22,780.51.

In stock markets abroad, indexes were mixed across Europe and Asia.

Japan’s Nikkei 225 was a big winner and rose 1.9% thanks in part to Hitachi’s jump.

In the bond market, the yield on the 10-year Treasury rose to 4.12% from 4.10% late Thursday.

Reports came in mixed on activity for U.S. businesses in the healthcare, real estate and other services industries. One from the Institute for Supply Management said growth is stalling, while another from S&P Global said it’s still growing slowly.

Choe writes for the Associated Press.