Stocks fall on Black Friday, but up for the month

Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images

Online Black Friday sales couldn’t make up for declines in phone and industrial shares on a half day of trading.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average and Standard and Poor’s 500 Index closed slightly down. The Nasdaq Composite Index, however, climbed .37 percent on higher technology stocks.

The S&P made gains of .4 percent for most of the morning, but closed down .1 percent at 1,805.65 at 1 p.m. in New York. Friday’s earlier gains from Amazon and EBay were putting the index on course to hit its eighth straight week of gains, which would have been the longest period of weekly gains since 2004.

For the month of November, however, the S&P rose 2.8 percent, the Dow 3.5 percent and the Nasdaq 3.6 percent.

The market’s recent performance — the Dow is still above 16,000 — is inspiring tampered confidence about the holiday shopping season. “The general mood is that we’re going to have growth this year in terms of holiday season shopping, though probably less than before the crisis,” Aaron Izenstark, co-founder and chief investment officer of Iron Financial LLC’s Iron Strategic Income Fund in Northbrook, Illinois, told Bloomberg.

But as we’ve explored on the Business Desk, some market-watchers see a bubble in the market’s recent highs. The Federal Reserve’s monetary stimulus program is artificially inflating the market, money managers like First Principles Capital Management’s Doug Dachille fear.

When the Fed will ease off this policy and what kind of reality check that will send to the market is the big question. According to the Fed’s latest board minutes, issued Nov. 20, the central bank will begin tapering their $85-billion-a-month asset purchases “in the coming months.” But four out of five investors in a Bloomberg poll don’t expect the Fed to taper asset purchases until March 2014. Analysts will be closely watching the release of November’s unemployment data next week — the first data not directly affected by the government shutdown — to assess the health of the economy and to predict Fed policy.