NEW YORK — A cooldown in oil prices on Friday is helping to release some of the pressure that’s built up on Wall Street, and U.S. stocks are ticking higher. The S&P 500 added 0.3 per cent, coming off a three-day losing streak marked by big swings caused by rising yields in the bond market. The main measure of the U.S. stock market’s health remains close to its all-time high set last month and is on track to finish its first winning week in the last three. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 179 points, or 0.3 per cent, as of 9:35 a.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 0.4 per cent higher. Stocks got a lift after the price for a barrel of Brent crude oil fell 1.6 per cent to $98.63. It’s been yo-yoing on uncertainty about when the war with Iran will allow oil to flow freely again from the Middle East. Prices go down when hopes rise for a possible deal to fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz to oil tankers, and they go up when doubts resurface. Earlier in the week, jumps for oil prices sent the yield on the 10-year Treasury toward 5.20 per cent and its highest level since 2007. Friday’s dip for crude prices helped the 10-year yield hold at 5.18 per cent, where it was late Thursday. That offered some relief because higher yields slow the economy by making borrowing money more expensive for everyone, while undercutting prices for stocks and other investments. Rising yields worldwide are rattling all kinds of financial markets, and yields are climbing because of worries about high inflation, big government debt loads, signs of continued economic strength and other reasons. The 10-year Treasury yield was at just 3.97 per cent before the beginning of the war with Iran. High yields hit stocks seen as the most expensive in particular. That has pressured stocks in the artificial-intelligence industry that soared in earlier years because of the frenzy around the technology. Nvidia added 0.9 per cent, a day after its slip of 0.4 per cent was the single heaviest weight on the S&P 500. Akamai Technologies leaped 12.5 per cent for one of the market’s bigger gains after the cloud company announced an $11.6 billion, multiyear agreement with Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI chatbot. Costco Wholesale rose 1.3 per cent after the retailer reported a stronger profit for the latest quarter than analysts expected, though some analysts also pointed to a slowdown in growth for its membership during the quarter. In stock markets abroad, indexes were mixed in Europe following bigger moves in Asia. Japan’s Nikkei 225 climbed 1.3 per cent, while Hong Kong’s Hang Seng dropped 1 per cent. ___ AP Business Writers Chan Ho-him and Michelle Chapman contributed to this report.
