NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- Financial stocks in the S&P 500 /quotes/comstock/10u!spx.x (SPX 918.90, -1.36, -0.15%) erased earlier losses to trade higher Thursday, buoyed by an analyst upgrade of Sallie Mae shares. The benchmark financial sector exchange-traded fund, Financial Select Sector SPDR Fund /quotes/comstock/13*!xlf/quotes/nls/xlf (XLF 11.92, +0.06, +0.51%) , was up 0.7% to $11.69 after falling as much as 1% in morning trade. J.P. Morgan Securities Inc. analyst Andrew Wessel upgraded shares of the student lender, officially known as SLM Corp. /quotes/comstock/13*!slm/quotes/nls/slm (SLM 9.27, +0.07, +0.76%) , to overweight from neutral, and raised his year-end price target to $12 a share. The new stock price estimate for Sallie Mae represented a 41% premium to Wednesday's close. Its shares were up nearly 11% to $9.22 a share.
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