The markets in the United States moved higher throughout the week, but fell sharply during Friday’s session amid gloomy economic data. Earlier this week, American retail sales, manufacturing and housing starts all surpassed economists’ expectations, but weak existing home sales and a poor start to the earnings season across the board erased much of those gains on the last day of the week.

International markets fared a little better, but still showed a little weakness toward the end of the week. In Europe, the weakness stemmed from Angela Merkel’s introduction of new requirements to use bailout funds to inject capital directly into ailing banks, which led to some concerns over Spain’s ability to remove those costs from its troublingly high national debt

The S&P 500′s SPDR (ARCA:SPY) exchange traded fund (ETF) experienced a strong ...