A calm end to a chaotic week for Wall Street

After a chaotic week on Wall Street, stocks ended not far off from where they started when the markets began gyrating wildly on Monday. The Dow Jones industrial average and the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index both ended the week down 1.5 percent and the Nasdaq Composite Index finished the week 1 percent lower.

In Friday’s trading, the Dow Jones rose 125.71 points, or 1.1 percent, to close at 11,269.02. Twenty-one out of 30 Dow stocks ended higher, with shares of Boeing Co., Hewlett-Packard Co. and United Technologies Corp. leading the pack, Marketwatch reports.

The S&P 500 increased 6.17 points, or 0.5 percent, to 1,178.81. And the Nasdaq advanced 15.30 points, or 0.6 percent, to finish at 2,507.98.

"It appears as though we’ve come out of this week almost whole," Bernie McGinn, founder of McGinn Investment Management, told the L.A. Times. "On Wednesday afternoon no one would have suspected that."

New spending data released on Friday presented a mixed picture to investors. A U.S. Commerce Department report said retail sales rose 0.5 percent in July, but a Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan survey showed consumer sentiment in August had dropped to its lowest level in more than 30 years, the New York Times reports.

However, U.S. investors seemed inspired by the rally in European stocks after the ban on short selling introduced by the governments of Belgium, France, Italy and Spain went into effect on Friday. The Euro Stoxx 50 index of euro zone blue chips rose more than 4 percent, the New York Times reports. London’s FTSE 100 index ended up 3.04 percent, the CAC 40 index in Paris rose 4.02 percent and Frankfurt’s DAX increased 3.45 percent.