Wall Street got the July jobs report it was hoping for, but the market didn't do much with it.
The Labor Department on Friday reported that the unemployment rate dropped to 10.2% last month, from 11.1% in June, as the U.S. added nearly 1.8 million jobs. That total was better than economists' estimates, though far lower than the 4.8 million jobs tacked on in June.
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But investors didn't reap many gains in blue-chip stocks. While the small-cap Russell 2000 soared 1.6% to 1,569, the Dow Jones Industrial Average finished the day with a modest 0.2% improvement, and the S&P 500 inched ahead by a mere 2 points to 3,351.
The Nasdaq Composite fared much worse, declining by 0.9% to 11,010 as hot-running components such as Apple (AAPL, -2.3%), Microsoft (MSFT, -1.8%) and Amazon.com (AMZN, -1.8%) stalled out Friday.
"While the U.S. economy added more jobs and the unemployment rate fell (both better than expectations), the July increase in non-farm payrolls confirms that the rise in new virus cases did slow the economic recovery to some extent," writes Gene Goldman, chief investment officer at Cetera Investment Management, a broker-dealer network encompassing more than 8,000 advisors and $250 billion in assets.
"One worry about
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