United States equity benchmarks closed at fresh records on Friday after a stronger-than-expected April employment report eased fears that the Iran war was beginning to spill into the labour market. The S&P 500 rose 0.84 per cent to 7,398.93, the Nasdaq Composite jumped 1.71 per cent to 26,247.08 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average added a single-digit twelve points to 49,609.16. All three indexes have now closed higher for six straight weeks, the longest such run since the autumn of 2024.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that nonfarm payrolls grew by 115,000 in April, almost double the 65,000 that economists surveyed by Bloomberg had expected, and revised the March figure up by an additional 28,000. The headline unemployment rate held at 4.3 per cent and the labour-force participation rate ticked up by a tenth of a percentage point to 62.6, easing concerns that the wartime mobilisation was draining workers from the civilian economy.
Equity strategists treated the report as a green light to extend the rally that began in mid-March, when President Donald Trump signalled the first concrete progress on the Iran ceasefire framework. Goldman Sachs raised its year-end S&P 500 target on Friday afternoon to 7,750 from 7,350, citing the resilience of corporate margins through the first quarter and the prospect of a Federal Reserve rate cut as early as the September meeting.
Tech remained the dominant driver, with the Magnificent Seven stocks adding more than a trillion dollars in combined market value over the week. Nvidia rose 2.6 per cent on Friday and is now within four per cent of its February all-time high; Apple gained 2.0 per cent on the back of the Wall Street Journal's Friday morning report that it had reached a preliminary chip-foundry agreement with Intel; and Meta closed at a record on confirmation that the company's open-source Llama 5 family had reached 350 million weekly active users.
Interest-rate-sensitive sectors lagged. Real-estate investment trusts fell 0.4 per cent on the session, and regional banks gave back 0.6 per cent, as the two-year Treasury yield rose to 4.18 per cent and the ten-year to 4.42. Federal-funds futures tied to the September FOMC meeting now imply roughly a forty-per-cent probability of a quarter-point cut, down from sixty per cent before the jobs report.