Wall St rises on hopes for Cyprus deal; ends down for week

By Caroline Valetkevitch

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. stocks rose on Friday on optimism that a deal to bail out Cyprus would be reached, but ended lower for the week for just the second time this year.

Nike shares jumped 11.1 percent to $59.53 and hit a record intraday high at $60.23, a day after the athletic shoe maker reported stronger-than-expected results. The news lifted consumer discretionary stocks, with the S&P 500 consumer discretionary sector index ending up 1.2 percent, leading the S&P 500 higher.

Cyprus was close to a deal to raise billions of euros and unlock a bailout from the European Union that could avert a financial meltdown and its exit from the euro, its ruling party said.

 

The lingering concern among investors is that were Cyprus to leave the euro zone, it would open the door for other larger countries to follow suit and debilitate the bloc.

"If, in fact, the talk of departures from the euro were to get front and center, that could scare investors at the macro level, but it's unlikely the Cyprus thing turns into that," said Sandy Lincoln, chief market strategist at BMO Asset Management US in Chicago.

The S&P 500 ended the week down 0.2 percent, which was just its second weekly decline of the year, as investors were alarmed that Europe's debt crisis would again roil markets over Cyprus' financial troubles.

Stocks have been gaining on news of a strengthening recovery and the view that the Federal Reserve would continue to support the economy. The S&P 500 is still up 9.2 percent for the year.

The Dow Jones industrial average rose 90.54 points, or 0.63 percent, to end at 14,512.03. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index gained 11.09 points, or 0.72 percent, to finish at 1,556.89. The Nasdaq Composite Index advanced 22.40 points, or 0.70 percent, to close at 3,245.00.

For the week, the Dow dipped just 0.01 percent, while the Nasdaq slipped 0.1 percent.

Tiffany & Co reported a slightly higher profit for the quarter that included the holiday season, and said the pace of its worldwide sales growth would pick up this year. Tiffany's stock gained 1.9 percent to $69.23.

Shares of food makers Mondelez International and PepsiCo rose on Friday after a UK newspaper reported that activist shareholder Nelson Peltz has been building stakes in both companies.

Mondelez rose 4.1 percent to $29.73. PepsiCo gained 3.3 percent to $78.64.

Other upbeat news came from Micron Technology . It posted a quarterly net loss on Thursday, but the chipmaker said the outlook for memory chip prices is improving. The stock gained 10.7 percent to end at $10.04 after hitting an intraday high of $10.27 - its highest in almost two years.

Volume was roughly 5.4 billion shares traded on the New York Stock Exchange, the Nasdaq and the NYSE MKT, compared with the 2012 average daily closing volume of about 6.45 billion.

Advancers outpaced decliners on the NYSE by nearly 9 to 5 and on the Nasdaq, by about 3 to 2.

(Additional reporting by Rodrigo Campos and Chuck Mikolajczak; Editing by Jan Paschal)