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(For a live blog on the US stock market, click or type LIVE / in an information window)
* The stock market will be closed for Labor Day Monday
* Ulta Beauty plummets after a year full of forecasts
* US consumer spending rises sharply and sentiment drops
* Dow up 0.16%, S & P up 0.06%, Nasdaq down 0.13% (Updates with closing prices, added commentary)
By Sinéad Carew
NEW YORK, Aug 30 (Reuters) – Wall Street closed last week with a dull session on Friday as investors were cautious before a holiday weekend in which a new round of US tariffs on imports from from China were to be lifted.
While the S & P 500 recorded its biggest weekly gain since June, August recorded its biggest monthly drop since May. Investors fled risky assets in August due to the escalation of the US-China trade war and the reversal of a key feature of the US yield curve that is often a sign of recession.
The US financial markets were to remain closed Monday on the occasion of Labor Day and a new series of US tariffs on some Chinese products was to come into effect Sunday. The trading volume was light and the S & P rocked between the negative and positive territories in the afternoon to end the day with little progress.
"People are becoming more and more defensive as the weekend approaches, because we have three days of no reaction to the news, and for the last three days we have been very uncertain about the rates," said Robert Phipps. director of Per Stirling Capital Management in Austin, Texas.
"Right now, everything is moving around the commercial complex and will probably be for the rest of the year," he said.
The United States and China had given encouraging signs of trade on Thursday as they discussed the next round of face-to-face negotiations in September.
But Randy Frederick, vice president of trading and derivatives at Charles Schwab in Austin, called for caution: "Frankly, markets have been too optimistic about trade."
The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 41.03 points, or 0.16%, to 26,403.28, the S & P 500 gained 1.88 points, or 0.06%, to 2,926.46 and the Nasdaq Composite lost 10.51 points, or 0.13%, to 7,962.88.
Vinay Pande, head of trading strategies at UBS Global Wealth Management in New York, recently took steps to rebalance his portfolios at the end of the month due to the length of the weekend.
Consumer spending in the United States rose sharply in July as households purchased a range of goods and services. While this may allay fears of financial market recession, a University of Michigan poll, also released Friday, showed that its consumer confidence index in August was plummeting since December 2012 amidst the nerves of the American-Chinese trade war.
"The news has been mixed, news about consumer and negative consumer confidence data has been positive," said Pande.
The consumer discretionary sector was the biggest drag for S & P, as Ulta Beauty Inc, which had been S & P's best-performing stock in the ten-year-old bull market on Wall Street, fell 29 6% after the cosmetics company reduced its profit forecast for the whole year.
One of the largest percentages of gains on the benchmark was Campbell Soup Co, which jumped 3.9% after quarterly earnings estimates.
Increasing issues outnumbered NYSE declines by a ratio of 1.38 to 1; on the Nasdaq, a ratio of 1.05 to 1 favored the advanced.
The S & P 500 has recorded 36 new highs over 52 weeks and no new lows; the Nasdaq Composite recorded 37 new highs and 62 new lows.
The volume of US trade was 5.77 billion shares, against 7.13 billion on average for the last 20 trading days. (Additional reportage of Noel Randewich in San Francisco, Akanksha Rana and Shreyashi Sanyal in Bengaluru, edited by Anil D & # 39; Silva, Chizu Nomiyama and David Gregorio)
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