YAHOO [BRIEFING.COM]: Technical support and a retreating dollar helped stocks bounce back after falling sharply in response to a disappointing jobs report, but there simply weren't enough buyers to drive stocks to a sustainable gain. In turn, stocks logged their fourth straight loss, which left the stock market down 1.8% for the week.

News that private employers slashed 263,000 jobs from payrolls during September struck stocks with weakness. Economists, on average, had expected job losses to total just 175,000. The worse-than-expected jobs number caused the unemployment rate to increase to 9.8% from 9.7%, but that was expected.

News that factory orders for August made a surprise 0.8% drop didn't help the early tone.

Market watchers were initially struck by the concerted selling effort that followed the disappointing data, since it contrasted the willingness of participants during recent weeks to shrug off worse-than-expected data. However, stocks were quick to show their resilience to the morning selling effort by bouncing back to the unchanged mark after coming in contact with the S&P 500's 50-day moving average, near 1020.

Stocks were also helped off of their lows by a retreating U.S. dollar. The greenback surrendered an early gain and settled with a 0.2% loss.

Stocks struggled to break above the flat line, however. That invoked some more modest selling pressure late in the session.

Financials had provided some support to the broader market, but faltered into the close. The sector was down as much as 2.1% and up as much as 1.1%, but finished with a loss of 0.1%. In turn, only the consumer discretionary sector settled in positive territory; it advanced 0.6%.

Trading volume was strong. Roughly 1.4 billion shares exchanged hands on the NYSE. That marks the third straight session that trading volume has eclipsed the 50-day moving average.DJ30 -21.61 NASDAQ -9.37 NQ100 -0.2% R2K -0.6% SP400 -1.0% SP500 -4.64 NASDAQ Adv/Vol/Dec 943/2.47 bln/1720 NYSE Adv/Vol/Dec 986/1.40 bln/2018