YAHOO [BRIEFING.COM]: Buyers continued to push stocks higher in the face of some rather ugly unemployment headlines as strong momentum from the previous session and pent up buying fed a positive bias.

The latest jobs report showed that 216,000 nonfarm payrolls were slashed in August. That marked the lowest job loss tally in one year and wasn't as bad as the 230,000 job losses that economists had come to expect, but the difficulty of finding a job sent the unemployment rate to a 25-year high of 9.7% from 9.4%. The consensus estimate had been pegged at 9.5%.

Though stocks struggled a bit to set forth on a clear trajectory in the minutes following the report, they benefited from some residual buying interest stemming from the previous session's late squeeze higher. Given that stocks had lost roughly 2.5% in the four sessions leading up to Friday's trade, participants also felt compelled to chase the gains registered in recent weeks.

This session's buying effort came on light trading volume, but that was generally expected going into Memorial Day weekend. Still, a lack of participation is often associated with a lack of conviction among broader-market participants, even though low-volume trade has been a hallmark of the stock market's summer rally. Hardly 1 billion shares traded hands on the NYSE this session, below the 50-day moving average of 1.2 billion shares.

Nonetheless, this session's gains were broad-based as roughly 85% of the companies in the S&P 500 settled with a gain. Seven of the 10 major sectors in the S&P 500 posted gains between 1.3% and 2.0%. Financials (+0.8%), consumer staples (+0.7%), and utilities (+0.3%) were relative laggards.

Stocks did stall as the S&P 500 ran into some near-term resistance. They then spent the afternoon drifting sideways before making a final upward push to close at the top end of the 1014 to 1016 zone.

Steady strength among stocks put Treasuries under pressure. That left the benchmark 10-year Note to drop 25 ticks, which put its yield back above 3.4%.

Gold prices also lost favor among investors, even though the U.S. dollar declined 0.3% against a basket of major foreign currencies. Gold prices settled this session fractionally lower at $996.70 per ounce after making their way to six-month highs and flirting with the $1,000 mark in the previous session. DJ30 +96.66 NASDAQ +35.58 NQ100 +2.0% R2K +1.4% SP400 +1.3% SP500 +13.16 NASDAQ Adv/Vol/Dec 1982/1.72 bln/677 NYSE Adv/Vol/Dec 2436/1.02 bln/582