Stocks Down On The Day, Up For The Year
NEW YORK (AP) — Stocks closed lower Monday, but finished the year with a gain overall.
The Dow Jones industrial average finished with a loss of 101 points at 13,264, and up 801 points for all of 2007. Declining issues on the New York Stock Exchange led gainers 17-15 on volume of 2.2 billion shares.
Meanwhile, the Nasdaq composite index was down 22 points at the 2,652 level, but posted a gain of 236 for the year, while the tech-heavy exchange saw 1.4 billion shares change hands. And the S&P 500 dropped 10 points, closing at 1,468 – but still managed to close out the year up 50 points.
Despite another in the string of triple-digit moves that became commonplace in the just-ended year, The Dow managed to finish 2007 with a respectable increase of more than 6% — a far cry from the 16.29% increase in 2006, but a better performance than the modest loss in 2005.
The annual gain came even after the blue chip index posted its worst fourth-quarter drop in 20 years, as investors battled with billion-dollar losses at the world’s biggest banks and cooler spending by consumers, whose budgets have been crimped by record-high oil prices and falling home prices.
