KEEPING SCORE: The Standard & Poor's 500 index rose 14 points, or 0.8 percent, to 1,863 as of 12:26 p.m. Eastern. The Dow Jones industrial average rose 120 points, or 0.7 percent, to 16,383 and the technology-heavy Nasdaq composite rose 49 points, or 1.2 percent, to 4,200.
START ME UP: The biggest gainer in the Dow was Microsoft, which rose 98 cents, or 3 percent, to $40.34. The company announced Thursday that it was bringing Microsoft Office to the iPad and would shift its focus away from Windows, a move that analysts cheered.
"We continue to view (this) as a massive revenue and operating profit opportunity for Microsoft," analysts at Credit Suisse said in a report Thursday. Other tech stocks also rose after a week of losses. Google, Intel and IBM each rose about 1 percent.
SPENDING UNFROZEN: Investors were encouraged by news that Americans picked up their spending last month, a hopeful sign for an economy that has been slowed by months of severe winter weather. The Commerce Department said consumer spending inched up 0.3 percent, a hair short of economists' forecasts. Incomes rose at the same pace.
CBS SPLITS: CBS Outdoor, a major outdoor advertising company, rose $1.93, or 7 percent, to $29.93 on its first day of trading. CBS decided to spin off CBS Outdoor into a separate publicly traded company because executives believed billboard advertising did not fit well with CBS's primary business of broadcasting.
OTHER MARKETS: The yield on the 10-year Treasury note hovered around 2.72 percent, up from 2.69 percent Thursday. The price of crude oil edged up 31 cents, or 0.3 percent, to $101.60 a barrel. Gold was little changed at $1,292.40 an ounce.
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