U.S. stocks gained, putting the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index within 1 percent of its record, as investors bet that the economy can withstand the slowing down of the Federal Reserve’s bond-buying program. Comcast Corp. added 1 percent as people familiar with the matter said Netflix Inc. agreed to pay for direct access to the cable company’s broadband network. Netflix slipped 0.6 percent. The S&P 500 increased 0.4 percent to 1,843.54 at 9:35 a.m. in New York. The equity benchmark fell 0.1 percent last week, leaving it 0.7 percent from its record and its level at the end of last year. The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 60.81 points, or 0.4 percent, to 16,164.11 today. “U.S. equities can go higher in 2014,� Drew Wilson, an investment analyst with Fenimore Asset Management in Cobleskill, New York, said in a phone interview. The firm oversees about $1.7 billion. “I believe the taper is not going to affect the real economy. I don’t know what it’ll do psychologically. I believe the fundamental recovery is real and will be strong enough to overcome the psychology.� The S&P 500 slumped as much as 5.8 percent after reaching the highest level ever on Jan. 15 as investor concern about continued cuts in the Fed’s monthly asset purchases fueled a rout in emerging markets. The index has rebounded 5.4 percent from its low on Feb. 3. It climbed to within six points of the 1,848.38 record on each day last week, without breaking through to a new high. Fed Stimulus Fed Chair Janet Yellen said this month that the economy has strengthened enough to withstand stimulus cuts, adding that only a notable change to the outlook would prompt the central bank to slow the pace of tapering. Yellen, in her first global forum as Fed chair, won praise at the Group of 20 nations meeting over the weekend for helping smooth emerging-market concerns as the U.S. tapers monetary stimulus. Three rounds of stimulus have helped push the S&P 500 as much as 173 percent higher from a 12-year low in 2009. The Commerce Department publishes its revised estimate for fourth-quarter growth on Feb. 28. The report will probably show that gross domestic product expanded 2.5 percent at an annualized pace, less than the government had forecast, according to a Bloomberg survey of economists. Investors have dismissed worse-than-forecast U.S. economic data over the past two weeks, speculating that severe winter weather explains the weakness in reports such as housing and hiring. The Bloomberg ECO U.S. Surprise Index, which measures how much recent data has beaten or missed economists’ estimates, fell to minus 0.429 on Feb. 21, the lowest since August 2011. To contact the reporters on this story: Sofia Horta e Costa in London at shortaecosta@bloomberg.net; Lu Wang in New York at lwang8@bloomberg.net To contact the editor responsible for this story: Lynn Thomasson at lthomasson@bloomberg.net

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