Stocks Shake Off Brief Slump

Stocks regained upward momentum Friday as the major U.S. indexes rode in the black from beginning to closing bell.

The market stumbled on Thursday following two days of advances in the wake of the Federal Reserve’s decision Tuesday to cut the lending rate by a half-point. But bullish earnings reports from Oracle and Nike helped Wall Street reverse course on Friday.

The Dow Jones rose 53.5 points, or 0.4 percent, to 13820, while the Nasdaq climbed 17 points, or 0.6 percent, to 2671. The S&P 500 ascended 7 points, or 0.5 percent, to 1526.

For the week, the three major indexes each gained nearly 3 percent.

Database vendor Oracle was up 94 cents, or 4.5 percent, to $21.98 after reporting a first-quarter profit of $840 million, or 16 cents per share, a 25 percent increase over last year’s Q1. Revenue hit $4.53 billion, topping analyst estimates of $4.3 billion. Oracle shares are at their highest since 2001.

Among other tech stocks, search giant Google saw shares hit an all-time high of $560.79 earlier Friday before settling back to $560.10, an advance of 7.27, or 1.3 percent. In the latest search engine rankings from ComScore Inc., Google remained No. 1 with a 56.5 percent share in August, up slightly over July.

Despite losing a small amount of market share in the ComScore rankings, Yahoo had a good day on Wall Street Friday, rising 76 cents, or 3.0 percent, to $26.05.

Shares of Apple advanced 3.84, or 2.7 percent, to $144.15 despite news that 1) CEO Steve Jobs has been subpoenaed by the SEC in a stock-options backdating case, and 2) a former Ramones drummer is suing Apple, Wal-Mart and Real Networks for alleged copyright infringement involving song downloads.

BlackBerry mobile device maker Research in Motion Limited gained 2.95, or 3.3 percent, to $93.18. That’s just short of its all-time high of 93.24, reached on Wednesday.