Wednesday, January 2, 2013

Stocks Finish Up for Day, Month, Year

Associated PressThe year’s work is done

The leading stock indexes all closed up Monday, making it a month of gains as well as a pretty good 2012.

After rising 1.7% on Monday, the Standard & Poor’s 500 index (SPY) registered a December gain of 0.7% to close 2012 up 13.41%. This month’s rise wasn’t enough to prevent a 1% fourth-quarter loss, the first year-end decline since 2008.

Despite the gain, the S&P is still almost 9% off its record closing high, 1,565.15, on Oct. 9, 2007.

Meanwhile, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DIA) finished up for the fourth straight year, rising 7.26% in 2012. Today the index rose 1.3%, its largest final-day of the year percent gain since 1974, and it closed up 0.6% for December.�It too, however, finished the year with a whimper, losing about 2.5% in the final quarter. The Dow is still 7.5% off its all-time closing high, 14,164.53 on Oct. 9, 2007.

The difference between the S&P and Dow this year was 6.15 percentage points which, as I noted earlier, is the biggest gap between the two since 2002.

The Dow’s top performers in 2012: Bank of America (BAC), up 108%; Home Depot (HD), up 47%, and Walt Disney (DIS), up 33%. The worst were Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and Intel (INTC), which fell 45% and 15%, respectively, this year.

As for the Russell 2000 index, that’s up 14.63% in 2012, and also saw 2.1% today, a 3.3% gain in December and a 1.4% gain in the fourth quarter. The index stands 1.8% off its record close of 865.29 on April 29, 2011.

I’ll be back ahead of the opening bell on Wednesday. Happy New Year, everyone.

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