December 10, 2008
At the close, all three indices were in plus territory, but not by the sizable margins of recent times. While the DJIA gained .81 percent, the NASDAQ and the S&P500 rose 1.17 percent and 1.19 percent. This performance, however, is far smaller than the daily changes of the past few months.
In fact, with just two exceptions, todays gains represent the smallest advances since October 31 25 trading days ago. On the other hand, the count of the advances larger than 3.4 percent for the DJIA, 3.8 percent for the S&P500, and 4.0 percent for the NASDAQ, in any one session, amounts to just 17 days in the 2,249 trading days since January 2000.
What’s more, ten of these, part of the 2008 downturn, came since March 18 of this year; while the other seven occurred during the market slide of 2001/2002.
DJIA .81 percent
NASDAQ 1.17 percent
S&P500 1.19 percent