NEW YORK: US stocks recovered from an early-week swoon to close the week with net gains, picking up enough momentum mid-week to override Friday's disappointing US jobs report.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average finished the week up 95.23 (0.61 percent) to 15,794.08.
The broad-based S&P 500 tacked on 14.43 (0.81 percent) to 1,797.02, while the tech-rich Nasdaq Composite Index advanced 21.98 (0.54 percent) to 4,125.86.
The gains ended two straight weeks of declines and followed a dreary January that shaved more than five percent from the Dow amid rising concerns about emerging economies and mediocre US earnings.
Those worries picked up new force on Monday, when US stocks fell more than two percent on an Institute for Supply Management report that showed surprisingly weak manufacturing activity.
Friday's monthly jobs report also lagged expectations. The Labor Department said the economy added 113,000 jobs in January, far below the 175,000 forecast.
But Friday's market benefited from a shift in sentiment that arrived earlier in the week, said Jack Ablin, chief investment officer of BMO Private Bank. All three indices gained more than one percent.
"All of a sudden, moods lightened," Ablin said Friday. "Attitudes improved somewhere midweek."
Ablin noted that all of the week's data was not weak. A jobs report from private payrolls firm ADP showed solid growth in January, while ISM data on the services sector bested expectations for January.
Investors may have written off Friday's jobs data to cold weather, said Chicago-based Ablin.
"You've had thousands of people stranded on roadways, you've had thousands of flight cancelled," Ablin said. "Speaking from the epicenter of the polar vortex, it's damn cold, and you're not going to go out and do things."
"It's probably not a surprise that Disney's earnings hinged on a movie called 'Frozen.'"
In fact, better-than-expected earnings from Disney did coincide with the turnaround in stocks. The results were released after the market close Wednesday and before strong rallies Thursday and Friday.
"Frozen," the studio's animated saga of the quest to end an "eternal snow" in the kingdom of Arendelle has become Disney's best-grossing animated film of all time, said chief executive Bob Iger.
"We had an incredibly strong first quarter," Iger said, noting "Thor: The Dark World" was also a box-office hit.
The Disney earnings report helped offset some other disappointing earnings results.
The most dramatic tumble came from Twitter, which plummeted more than 24 percent Thursday following its first earnings report as a publicly traded company.
Some analysts slammed the microblogging company after data showed the number of worldwide users was up just nine million from the figure of 232 million when Twitter went public in November.
Stifel analyst Jordan Rohan downgraded Twitter, noting that "user growth metrics faltered."
"The company did a poor job explaining how and why the lower user growth was a temporary phenomenon," Rohan added.
General Motors also disappointed, with earnings of 57 cents per share, badly lagging forecasts for 87 cents per share.
However, GM shares recovered most of their losses after executives characterized the results as partly the effect of restructuring costs in Europe that could not be avoided.
Other major corporate stories included Microsoft's selection of Satya Nadella as the company's third chief executive and an announcement by drugstore chain CVS Caremark that it will halt the sale of tobacco products in its 7,600 stores throughout the US.
Next week's agenda will be highlighted by congressional testimony from new Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen. There will also be a handful of economic reports, including the retail sales report for January.
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