A frustrated Wall Street was left on the verge of hitting its best blue-chip high in nearly four years after the Dow Jones industrial average peeked through the 13,000-point mark twice, only to withdraw both times to ruin the long-awaited moment.
Buoyed by Europe’s all-night saga of hardball talks for solving its debt crisis, investors here jumped into a buying spree at the opening bell with high hopes of the Dow closing above 13,000 for the fist time since May 19, 2008.
It twice hit the magic moments briefly after lunchtime to an intraday high as 13,005.04, but fell back to end the session at 12,965.69, up 15.82 — still about 34 points shy of the symbolic milestone.
But the session wasn’t a total letdown.
The market value of the 30 stocks on the Dow showed a revived value of $1.71 trillion, a solid comeback from their $1.29 trillion value the last time the Dow closed above 13,000, at 13,028.16 on May 19, 2008.
The broadly traded Standard & Poor’s 500 Index ended little changed yesterday at 1,362.21, its highest close since the June 5, 2008 session of 1,404.05. The S&P is up 8.32 percent this year, and the Dow is ahead 6.12 percent.
The Nasdaq is up 13.81 percent since January, but slipped 3.21 points yesterday to close at 2,948.57.
Some investors lost interest in flirty stocks and put their cash into a crude oil rally. The commodity surged here 2.5 percent to a nine-month high of $105.84 a barrel amid profit-taking and worries about Iran’s new saber-rattling, and gold closed the New York spot session at $1,760.30, up 1.5 percent, or $26.20 an ounce.
No comments:
Post a Comment