Industrials led the sector funds as Caterpillar, GE Aerospace and Bloom Energy rose

Eight of the eleven sector funds rose. Inside the leader, a small holding nearly matched the two biggest names.

Caterpillar rose 2.0% and GE Aerospace rose 2.3%. They are the two largest holdings in AXLI, the fund that holds US industrial companies, and each added 0.14 percentage points. Bloom Energy is 1.5% of the fund. It rose 8.3% and added 0.12 percentage points, rebounding from a 3.1% drop on Thursday that followed concerns about Oracle's Project Jupiter, a New Mexico data center meant to run on Bloom's fuel cells. The three added 0.40 percentage points, less than half of the 0.95% gain.

Microsoft rose 3.7% after introducing a new Copilot, with a coding tool and an agent that keeps working when the user is away. Apple rose 1.5%, and together they added 0.32 percentage points to ASPY, the fund that holds the S&P 500. ASPY rose 0.54%. BRSP, which holds the same companies in equal amounts rather than by size, rose 0.40% and trailed by 0.14 percentage points, less than those two stocks added on their own. Since August 25 the equal-weight fund has trailed by 5.5 percentage points.

Nvidia sat out the rise in technology. It is the largest holding in AVGT, the fund that holds US information-technology companies, and it rose 0.2% while the fund rose 0.78%, a gain Microsoft and Apple did most of.

Meta fell 3.3% and was the largest drag on the S&P 500 fund. The company is 23% of AXLC, the fund that holds communication-services companies, and the holding was behind most of that fund's 0.90% drop. Meta is still up 13% this week, a run that followed early success for Muse, its AI agent.

Producers fell and refiners rose. Devon Energy fell 3.8% and ConocoPhillips fell 1.6%, while Valero rose 1.1% and Marathon Petroleum rose 0.7%. AXLE, the fund that holds the big US energy companies, fell 0.89%, less than oil, with Exxon Mobil, the largest holding, down 1.0%. West Texas Intermediate, the US oil benchmark, settled at $92.41, down 2.3%, on hopes for a truce in the Iran war and on talk of a US ban on diesel exports. Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia continued.

The 10-year Treasury yield closed at 5.17%. AXLU, the fund that holds US utility companies, touched a new 52-week low and closed up 0.38% on 1.3 times its usual volume, while AVNQ, the fund that holds US property companies, fell 0.20% on 1.7 times its usual volume. The utilities fund is still 17% below its high of the past year.