Wall Street capped a turbulent week of trading Friday with the biggest weekly loss for the U. S. stock market in nearly nine months.
Wall Street capped a turbulent week of trading Friday with the biggest weekly loss since March as traders fret over rising trade tensions between Washington and Beijing and signals of slower economic growth.
The latest wave of selling erased more than 550 points from the Dow Jones Industrial Average, bringing its three-day loss to more than 1,400. For the week, major indexes are down more than 4 percent.
Worries that the testy U. S.-China trade dispute and higher interest rates will slow the economy have made investors uneasy, leading to volatile swings in the market from one day to the next.
On Monday, news that the U. S. and China had agreed to a 90-day truce in their escalating trade conflict drove stocks sharply higher, adding to strong gains the week before. The next day, as doubts mounted over the likelihood of a swift resolution to the trade dispute, stocks sank.
That sell-off extended to Thursday, when U. S. stock markets reopened for trading after a national day of mourning for former President George H. W. Bush. An early plunge knocked 700 points off the Dow as investors worried the arrest of a senior Chinese technology company official would undermine trade negotiations between Washington and Beijing, but stocks bounced nearly all the way back by the end of the day on news that the Federal Reserve was considering a wait-and-see approach to its interest rate hikes.
That optimism fueled a rally early Friday, which faded into another sharp drop.
« We’re in a market where investors just want to sell any upside that they see, » said Lindsey Bell, investment strategist at CFRA. « The volatility we’ve seen the last couple of weeks has been pretty extreme in both directions. »
The S&P 500 index fell 2.3 percent. The index has ended lower three out of the last four weeks. The Dow dropped 2.2 percent. The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite slid 3 percent.
The S&P 500 and Dow are now in the red for the year again. The Nasdaq was holding on to a modest gain.
The current bull market for stocks, which began in March 2009, has shown signs of sputtering this year, with the S&P 500 entering into a correction, or drop of 10 percent from a recent high, twice this year. The index is now down 10.2 percent from its all-time high on Sept. 20.
The market is now on track for its worst year since 2008, when the S&P 500 ended with a 38.5 percent loss.
Volatility has gripped the market since early October, reflecting investors’ worries that the Federal Reserve might raise interest rates too aggressively as it tries to keep inflation in check, potentially slowing economic growth.
