STUNNING!!!
I was just stunned by this headline:
Stocks surge as investors hunt for bargains
Here’s one of the paragraphs that jumped off the page for me:
In the final minutes of trading, the Dow rose 709.42, or 8.68 percent, to 8,885.19. The big moves weren’t a surprise, given the huge swings stocks have shown in the past six weeks since the bankruptcy filing of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. Only two of the 19 trading days in October haven’t ended with the Dow up or down by triple digits.
Obviously, this waws written before the final bell rang. Here’s the final count:
Dow 9,065.12 +889.35 +10.88%
Nasdaq 1,649.47 +143.57 +9.53%
S&P 500 940.49 +91.57 +10.79
I’m not a stock broker so I don’t know the answer to this question so I’ll ask that someone far more knowledgeable than me this question: Have there been many times when all 3 indexes gained 10% the same day? I can’t imagine that there’ve been many days like this.
This doesn’t mean the economy is back on stable ground. It’s just an interesting bit of news.
Technorati Tags: NYSE, NASDAQ, S & P 500, Stock Market
Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog
This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 28th, 2008 at 10:37 pm and is filed under Author: Gary Gross, Capitalism, Economy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
October 29th, 2008 at 7:02 am
At this point, I wouldn’t go further than to say its a reaction to the market being grossly oversold, more than or regardless of any political activity. Hardly an indication we are on solid ground yet. I would also expect some profit taking by the day traders to take it back down a few hundred points.
October 29th, 2008 at 7:10 am
But to answer your question, you’d probably have to go back a ways, I just dont know. The crash in ‘29 the major index bottomed at 41 from a high over 200, not sure what it bounced back to, but it took us nearly 30 years to hit 1,000.
October 30th, 2008 at 11:26 am
This is a question without a premise because the composition of indexes themselves have changed radically over the years. Many old Dow components no longer exist. Next, ten percent of 10,000 is 1,000 but the market was below 1,000 for most of the life of this country, so 10% would be 100. If you’ll check you’ll see that “Black Friday” in ‘87 saw the market fall more than 20%; in ‘29 it fell from 381 to 145 a smaller move by today’s market but in terms of percent it was more than 60%. This was followed by a big rally until it collapsed again in 1931 never to return until 1953. The actual ‘29 top to bottom drop was 89%. Today that would have been a move of 9,700 points—-different times.