<Dow up 59 as NEW YORK -- Stocks lurched higher in heavy, skittish trading today as the Dow industrials recovered from a loss of up to 125 points in the final hour of trading.
markets struggle
to recover
It was an extremely choppy
day on Wall Street as some
analysts said they
were still bullishToday's gain followed yesterday's nearly 300-point plunge and interrupted a slide that had briefly sent Wall Street's best-known indicator more than 10 percent below the record 9,337.97 reached just 21/2 weeks ago.
The Dow Jones industrial average closed with a gain of 59.47 at 8,546.78. But the going was shaky. In just the first half hour, the Dow opened with a gain, quickly turned 75 points lower, then turned higher. It later rose as much as 87 points before selling picked up again and the Dow skided as much as 125 points lower during the final hour of trading.
At its low of the day, the Dow was down 10.4 percent, or 975 points, from its July 17 record.
Broader indicators were mostly higher.
Investors drew some confidence from solid profit reports by America Online Inc. and Cisco Systems Corp.
There also were encouraging comments from prominent market strategists, including Abby Joseph Cohen at Goldman Sachs, Edward Kerschner at PaineWebber, and Jeffrey Applegate at Lehman Brothers.
"We would be aggressive buyers and we believe that if investors buy today, six-12 months from now they will be glad they did," Kerschner said in a statement.
The Dow, Wall Street's best-known indicator, fell 299.43 points yesterday to finish at 8,487.31 in the second busiest day in history. Only the 554.26-point loss of Oct. 27, 1997 and the 508.00-point fall of Oct. 19, 1987 were bigger point drops. But in percentage terms, the drop was not close to a record.
Volume yesterday totaled a hefty 1.007 billion shares, only the second time more than 1 billion New York Stock Exchange-listed shares changed hands.
Less than three weeks after jumping to record highs, the stock market found itself reeling from its worst beating since last October.
Investment pros are divided over whether the market is mired in one of its frequent post-rally downturns, popularly known as a correction, or caught in the throes of something far more severe.
World markets followed Wall Street, although Tokyo's Nikkei average was down a mere 0.2 percent, dropping 31 points to close at just under 16,000. Markets in Taiwan fell today to their lowest level in almost two months, while shares were down more than 3 percent in South Korea, and dropped moderately in Australia and New Zealand.
In Europe, stocks finished above the day's lows as Wall Street began to regain some ground in the morning. The blue-chip Financial Times-Stock Exchange 100-share index, at one point down by nearly 2.9 percent, closed with a loss of 103.6 points, or 1.8 percent, at 5,632.5 on the London Stock Exchange, Europe's biggest.
"It is unpleasant and nasty -- a white-knuckle ride," said Jeremy Batstone, an analyst at Natwest Stockbrokers in London.
Today on Wall Street, decliners outnumbered advancers by a 13-to-9 margin on the New York Stock Exchange, where late-day volume totaled a hefty 849.96 million shares, up from 826.76 million at the same point yesterday.
The Standard & Poor's 500 index rose 9.31, or 0.87 percent, to 1,081.43. The Nasdaq composite index gained 2.56, or 0.14 percent, to 1,788.20. It was the second-busiest trading day ever on the New York Stock Exchange.
The NYSE composite index was up 2.65 at 544.01.
But the Russell 2000 index of smaller companies was down 2.94 at 398.69 and the smaller-company dominated American Stock Exchange composite index was down 6.69 at 672.07.
"There are some incredible buys out there," said Jim Glickenhaus, a partner at Glickenhaus & Co., which oversees $6 billion. Glickenhaus & Co. has been buying shares of Chrysler Corp., Ford Motor Co. and Merrill Lynch & Co.
U.S. bonds fell for the first time in five days as the government and companies lined up to sell more than $40 billion of debt in coming weeks with yields near record lows. The benchmark 30-year Treasury bond fell 17/32, or $5.31 per $1,000 bond, pushing its yield up 4 basis points to 5.67 percent.
The dollar fell to 143.86 yen in late New York trading from 144.92 yesterday.
The Russell 2000 index of smaller companies was down 3.14 at 398.49 and the smaller-company dominated American Stock Exchange composite index was down 6.69 at 672.07.