Yahoo TV

STORY: A choppy day of trading on Wall Street Thursday led to a mixed performance for the major indexes.

The Dow fell about half of one percent while the S&P 500 dropped three tenths, and the Nasdaq gained a quarter of one percent.

Stocks were mostly higher earlier in the session after economic reports helped allay concerns of labor market deterioration.

The focus shifted later in the day to Friday’s key jobs report which will likely set the stage for the Federal Reserve to begin cutting rates later this month.

Brian Mulberry, client portfolio manager with Zacks Investment Management, explains how he thinks investors should position themselves at this point in the economic cycle.

“So what you really want to look for is not individual sectors necessarily, but individual names that have very good durable earning structures and other sub categories like low levels of debt. That way, no matter what happens with interest rates, their capital structure is not as impacted as some others who've been financing their growth structures and that's how you can simply avoid some of this immediate volatility. And we expect that volatility probably lasts through the end of the year as we start to work out, you know what interest rates will actually do versus the expectation.”

Stocks on the move included Tesla which rose about 5% after it said it will launch its full self-driving advanced driver assistance software in the first quarter next year in Europe and China, pending regulatory approval.

And shares of JetBlue Airways added 7% after the carrier raised its third-quarter revenue forecast.