Fridays closes were higher than a week ago, with the daily NASDAQ off a bit and the DJIA and S&P500 rising less than .4 percent for the day. Thursdays market escalation, after the Fed cut its fed funds rate a day earlier, dominated the action.
Its possible to become quite optimistic,when looking at the price achievements of the past few weeks. Indeed, this Friday, the indices extended their weekly advance to three weeks in a row.
In this 18th week of 2008, the S&P500 finally closed higher than on the first Friday of the year. Although the NASDAQ now has moved up six times over the last eight Fridays, this index is still about a percent below its price at the beginning of 2008.
The DJIA, however, surpassed its beginning of the year level three weeks ago; its weekly trough occurred on March 7, some eight Fridays ago, and since then has only two weekly declines.
At this point, looking backwards, the bottom of the recent decline can be isolated at the levels of March 7 and March 14. And while the market still has its weekly ups and downs, since those dates, the successive closes and percent advances, when the weeks ends on a positive note, are above the previous best 2008 results for all three indices.
DJIA .37 percent
NASDAQ -.15 percent
S&P500 .32 percent