YAHOO [BRIEFING.COM]: Friday marked an extremely quiet and thinly traded session as many market participants remained on vacation.  Stocks stuck to a tight trading range near the unchanged mark, although late-session buying interest help the major indices settle with modest gains.

After sticking to a tight trading range the S&P 500 settled with a 0.5% gain with all sectors in positive territory.  Energy (+1.8%) and materials (+1.7%) advanced the most strength to gains in the underlying commodities.

Only 517 mln shares exchanged hands on the NYSE.  For comparison, the market has averaged about 1.5 billion shares per day during the past year and Dec. 24, which was a half day, had a volume of 404 million.

Overall it was a slow news day with no earning or economic reports.  However, there are a few noteworthy items.

GMAC, the 49% held financing arm of General Motors (GM 3.64, +0.39), had its application to become a banking holding company approved by the Federal Reserve.  Shares of GM are up 13.5% as the GMAC news should help keep credit flowing to GM dealers.  As a bank holding company, GMAC will have access to TARP funds.

In other news, Reuters reported that sales at U.S. retailers fell as much as 4% during the holiday season, according to data released by SpendingPulse.  SpendingPulse, a report on consumer spending in multiple industries based on aggregate sales activity in the MasterCard payments network, showed that the 2008 holiday shopping season was the weakest in decades, according to Reuters. Retailers underperformed with a 0.1% loss this session.

Not all retailers saw sales declines.  Amazon.com (AMZN 51.78, +0.34) announced that sales between Nov. 1 and Dec. 24 marked the best holiday season ever for the online-based retailer.  AMZN gave up much of its opening advance to settle with only a 0.7% gain.

In commodity trading, February crude oil ($37.88 +2.53) rose ~$1.50 in the final 15 minutes of pit trading after falling off original highs of $37.64 set at 1:20 PM ET. Earlier, crude oil had been trending higher after the United Arab Emirates said it would reduce production to remain in-line with OPEC targets.

In metals trading, on no clear catalyst, gold (+22.3) and silver (+0.345) spiked sharply just before 1:00 PM ET to new session highs, which was not related to the modest move lower in the dollar.DJ30 +47.07 NASDAQ +5.34 SP500 +4.65 NASDAQ Adv/Vol/Dec 1652/584 mln/1086 NYSE Adv/Vol/Dec 2284/517 mln/772