Financial services pull down stocks to weekly loss

The stock market capped a week of mostly light trading Thursday with its first weekly loss since mid-February.

A slide in banks and other financial services companies pulled the market broadly lower for much of the day. By late afternoon, the Dow Jones industrial average and the Nasdaq composite recaptured losses from earlier in the day. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index, a broad measure of the stock market, stayed in the red. Oil prices fell.

Trading was relatively quiet ahead of the Easter holiday weekend. U.S. markets will be closed today for the Good Friday holiday.

“Volume is very light today, probably the lightest that we’ve had in a month,” said Quincy Krosby, market strategist at Prudential Financial. “That can skew markets in either direction.”

The Dow rose 13.14, or 0.08 percent, to 17,515.73. The S&P 500 index slipped 0.77, or 0.04 percent, to 2,035.94. The Nasdaq added 4.65, or 0.10 percent, to 4,773.51.

Coming into this week, the stock market had mounted a five-week string of gains that helped reverse some of Wall Street’s hefty losses from the market’s stumbling start to 2016.

The market’s rebound gained momentum last week when the Federal Reserve announced that it would slow the pace of interest rate increases this year, citing worries about the global economy. But this week, some Fed bank presidents made public comments that suggested the pace of rate hikes might not be slowed after all.

This story was originally published March 24, 2016 at 6:34 PM with the headline "Financial services pull down stocks to weekly loss."