US stocks : Dow up 0.21 pct
U.S. stocks advanced on Friday, putting the S&P 500 on track for its biggest weekly gain in over a year after a jobs report showed employers kept the pace of hiring steady in December.
The Labor Department said payrolls outside the farming sector grew by 155,000 jobs last month, slightly below November's level. Gains in employment were distributed broadly throughout the economy, from manufacturing and construction to healthcare.
Also helping to keep equities afloat was data from the Institute for Supply Management showing U.S. service sector activity expanding the most in 10 months.
"It feels like the economy, we're not burning the barn down, but we are doing fine - we seem to be growing and the fiscal cliff does not seem to have weighed too much on December employment," said Paul Mendelsohn, chief investment strategist at Windham Financial Services in Charlotte, Vermont.
The S&P 500 index's weekly gain would be its largest since December 2011. The majority of the gains were achieved earlier in the holiday-shortened week, including the largest daily gain for the benchmark S&P index in more than a year on Wednesday, after a deal was struck in Washington to avert the "fiscal cliff."
"So far there is nothing that has come out that has been negative following the push, they tried to read into the Fed minutes yesterday and take it down but so far they haven't had much success," Mendelsohn said.
But a drag on Apple Inc shares, down 2.6 percent to $528.36, kept the Nasdaq near the uchanged mark, as
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