The Dow and S&P 500 snapped a four-day losing streak on Thursday ahead of jobs data expected to strengthen the Federal Reserve's commitment to monetary tightening.

Stocks were in the red most of the trading day, but rallied in the final hour in an apparent round of bargain hunting.

"The market got stretched to the downside," said Art Hogan, chief market strategist at B Riley Wealth Management, noting a bruising stretch since remarks Friday by Fed Chair Jerome Powell sent stocks tumbling.

Analysts expect the US economy added a solid 300,000 jobs in August and that unemployment remained 3.5 percent.

"We're in this world where we're afraid that good news is going to embolden the Fed to be even more aggressive," Hogan said.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average ended up 0.5 percent at 31,656.42.

The broad-based S&P 500 gained 0.3 percent to 3,966.85, while the tech-rich Nasdaq Composite Index shed 0.3 percent to 11,785.13.

Among individual companies, Nvidia slumped 7.7 percent after the chip company disclosed that the US government restricted exports of processing equipment to China and Russia to prevent their militaries from using them.

Twitter dipped 0.3 percent after it announced it had begun actively testing an edit button, following months of publicly discussing such a tweak.

Under the revision being studied, users could edit a tweet "a few times" in the 30 minutes after the initial posting, Twitter said. (AFP)