Stocks see slight gains after encouraging report on hiring

Associated Press

NEW YORK

An encouraging report on hiring barely fazed the stock market Friday, leaving indexes with the slightest of gains. For investors, good is no longer good enough.

The Labor Department said that U.S. employers added 214,000 jobs to their payrolls in October. That knocked the unemployment rate down to 5.8 percent, the lowest rate since July 2008. But Wall Street wanted more.

“This isn’t a bad report by any means,” Dan Greenhaus, chief strategist at the brokerage BTIG in New York, wrote in a note to clients. Nine months of employers’ hiring more than 200,000 workers is an encouraging trend. But he described the 214,000 figure as “certainly disappointing.”

The Standard & Poor’s 500 index eked out a gain of 0.71 point to end at 2,031.92. The Dow Jones industrial average gained 19.46 points, or 0.1 percent, to 17,573.93. The Nasdaq composite fell 5.94 points, or 0.1 percent, to 4,632.53.

“The market is priced for perfection right now,” said Brad McMillan, chief investment officer for Commonwealth Financial in Waltham, Mass.