Low rates, hopes for trade deal lift stocks

NEW YORK — It’s the market that continues mostly upward, even though there’s still plenty to worry about.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average and the Nasdaq closed at record highs yet again on Tuesday, and the S&P 500 closed barely below the all-time high it reached a day earlier.

The gains in recent weeks have been driven by company earnings that haven’t been nearly as terrible as Wall Street was expecting, interest rate cuts, hopes for a trade truce and a steadily growing economy. In all, the S&P 500 is up 22.7 percent so far this year, putting it on pace for its best year since 2013.

The upbeat mood marks a pivot from the summer, when worries about trade, Britain’s potentially messy exit from the European Union and the slowing global economy loomed over the market.

As of Friday, 71 percent of the members of the S&P 500 index have reported their results, and 76 percent of them have reported better-than-forecast results, according to FactSet. Also, 61 percent have reported higher than expected sales, important in the wake of concerns about an economic slowdown and the U.S.-China trade war.

Last week, the government estimated that employers added 128,000 jobs in October. It was a modest gain, but the figure was depressed by the temporary loss of about 50,000 striking GM workers and the subtraction of 20,000 short-term Census jobs. Excluding those drags, the job gain would have been much higher. The government also revised up its estimate of job growth for August and September.