Wall Street closes the day with gains, as the market ignores Moody's downgrades.

NEW YORK, New York.- Wall Street closed in the green on Monday, with the S&P 500 index rising for the sixth consecutive day and the market ignoring Moody's downgrade of its U.S. credit rating last Friday.

At the close of trading on Monday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.32% to 42,792 points; the S&P 500 advanced 0.09% to 5,963 points; and the Nasdaq technology index rose a slight 0.02% to 19,215 points.

U.S. Treasury yields soared as much as 5% today after Moody's downgraded the country's credit rating from "Aaa" to "Aa1" due to the increase in government debt and interest payments over the past decade.

Specifically, the yield on the 30-year bond rose to 5% during the session; the 10-year bond rose to 4.5%, and the 2-year bond climbed to 4%.

Moody's, one of the leading rating agencies, said in a statement last Friday that "successive administrations and the U.S. Congress have failed to agree on measures to reverse the trend of large annual fiscal deficits and rising interest costs," the first reason given for the rating downgrade.

At its lows on Monday morning, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell more than 300 points and the S&P 500 lost about 1%. However, the major indexes pared their losses and closed higher as Treasury yields retreated from their highs.

Traders now believe that further trade agreements—like last week's agreement between the U.S. and China to reduce their tariffs on each other—are key to sustaining the stock market's recovery.

Among the 30 largest Dow stocks, UnitedHealth Group (8.21%) rose the most today, recovering a significant portion of the ground it lost at the end of last week when The Wall Street Journal reported that the Department of Justice was investigating it for alleged fraud in Medicare health plans.

Merck (1.54%) and Amgen (1.26%) also rose; while Nike (-1.63%), Chevron (-1.35%), and Salesforce (-1.21%) fell.

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