Stocks start week off with a bang

Securities investors kept the stock market’s upward momentum going Monday, sending shares sharply higher after retail sales rebounded more than expected in October and the dollar extended its slide.

Major stock indexes rose more than 1 percent to new 13-month highs, including the Dow Jones industrial average, which jumped 136 points. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index closed above the 1,100 mark for the first time in more than a year.

The weaker dollar lifted gold to a new record and pumped up prices of other commodities, including oil. That, in turn, helped shares of energy and materials companies.

Stocks got another boost after Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke reaffirmed in a midday speech that the central bank would hold interest rates at record-low levels for an “extended period,” and that he didn’t see signs that the money being pumped into the economy by the government was creating speculative bubbles. Bond prices rose after Bernanke said inflation appeared contained.

Some analysts have cautioned that the surge in stocks, which has been hastened by the falling dollar, might not be justified by the still-struggling economy. In fact, they say some investors might misread the big advance in stocks as a sign that the economy is stronger than it actually is.

The market’s own dynamics fed some of the day’s gains.

The S&P is breaking through the 1,100 mark, which is psychologically significant, and the market is seeing a little pop from this. Stocks began rising from the start after the Commerce Department said retail sales rose 1.4 percent in October, nearly double the increase forecast by economists polled by Thomson Reuters. It was a sharp rebound following the 2.3 percent drop in September. Excluding the gain from autos, however, sales rose just 0.2 percent, half of what economists predicted.

The broader S&P 500 index rose 15.82, or 1.5 percent, to 1,109.30. It has hovered around the 1,100 mark for a month but hadn’t closed above it since October last year. The index first finished above 1,100 more than a decade ago, in March 1998.