Citigroup said it operated at a profit during the first two months of the year. That energized financial stocks and in turn, the entire market. Surprised investors drove the major indexes up more than 5.5 per cent to their biggest one-day rally of the year. The Dow Jones industrials shot up nearly 380 points.
In response to Wall Street’s welcome upturn at the beginning of March, Harry Rady of Rady Assets Management, San Diego, California was quoted as saying:
A little bit of good news went a long way because there was so much pessimism,” said Harry Rady, chief executive of Rady Asset Management. “Could there be follow through tomorrow? Maybe. In the next few weeks or months I’ve got to imagine we’ll give this back. The economy is in an absolute free fall,” he said. “I’d be very surprised if this was a bottom.
On March 10th the S&P 500 index rose 43.07, or 6.4 per cent, to 719.60, while the Nasdaq composite rose 89.64, or 7.1 per cent, to 1,358.28.
Most analysts are cautiously optimistic and are waiting to see which way Wall Street is heading in the upcoming near future though there is a worry that hundreds of billions of dollars in government bailouts wouldn’t be enough to save the big banks.
This upturn was described as a brief rally in an overall bear market, meaning that we can expect more market downturns before the market begins its eventual recovery. A bear market is defined as a drop of at least 20% from a market high, which stocks passed last year in their relentless plunge downward. Now the market is at less than half its value that it had at the highest points it reached in October of 1997.
Read More Here