Wall Street stocks end worst year since 2008
The US stock market concluded its worst year since the global financial crisis on Monday following a late-season collapse that also raised doubts about the prospects for 2019.
Major indices notched modest gains in the year's final session, but it barely made a dent compared with the rest of December, the market's worst month in nearly a decade.
Ending in the red for 2018 did not appear in the cards in the first weeks of the year, when Wall Street repeatedly shot to new records on the heels of a sweeping tax cut signed into law in December 2017 by President Donald Trump.
But it did not take long for a host of worries to shake that confidence, from unease over an unpredictable series of trade wars launched by Trump, to angst over rising interest rates, to nervousness over economists' warnings of slowing growth, or worse, a possible recession.
And the declines rapidly accelerated in the final weeks of 2018, erasing all the gains since January.
Concluding the year with losses is "astonishing," Manulife senior portfolio manager Nate Thooft told AFP. "From an investor perspective, it probably shakes them a bit."
There was a spurt of renewed optimism on Monday, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average finished the final session with a gain of 1.2 percent at 23,327.46.
The broad-based S&P 500 climbed 0.9 percent to end at 2,506.85, while the tech-rich Nasdaq Composite Index advanced 0.8 percent to 6,635.28.
But even with Monday's boost, the Dow finished 2018 with loss of 5.6 percent compared to the end of 2017, the S&P 500 with a drop of 6.2 percent and the Nasdaq with a decline of 3.9 percent.
That was after a year in which they indices jumped 25.1 percent, 19.4 percent and 28.2 percent -- before companies logged massive jumps in profits this year due in part to the tax cut.
At the start of 2018, investor sentiment ranged somewhere between optimism and euphoria as the Dow surged above 25,000 for the first time and then hit 26,000 less than two weeks later.
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