It was a dizzying end of the week for market participants. Stocks had a slow start Friday thanks to a good-news-is-bad-news jobs report. However, the main indexes eventually turned tail and rallied hard on the back of well-received earnings from a pair of Big Tech giants.
Ahead of Friday's open, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said the U.S. added 353,000 new jobs in January, blowing past the 185,000 economists were expecting. Both the unemployment rate (3.7%) and participation rate (62.5%) were unchanged vs December, while average hourly earnings were up 0.6% month-over-month and 4.5% year-over-year.
