Stocks traded higher this morning with the news that U.S. employers added 175,000 jobs in February, above most predictions.
The increase came in spite of a particularly brutal winter and poor job gains in December and January.
The Standard & Poor’s 500 was up four points to 1,881, with financial and energy stocks seeing the largest gains Friday morning. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 63 points to 16,485. And the Nasdaq Composite was up one point to 4,353.
Unemployment insurance claims were down by 26,000 from last week, to a seasonally adjusted 323,000. The unemployment rate was up 0.1 percent, to 6.7 percent.
