Stocks ended up for the day but down on the quarter, with the Dow down 7.55%, the S&P 500 down 9.92% and the Nasdaq down 14.07%. This was the worst quarterly performance since the 3rd quarter of 2002. The indexes did bounce off of their lows for the quarter, being down between 12% and 18%.
The question is the market trying to find the bottom, or is this a pause before it drops further? My guess is that as long as there are no new big blow ups the market will trade around this level until next year.
Not to say that Wall Street was overly optimistic, but the down markets seemed to be a surprise.
One reason for the uneasiness (or rotten quarter) is that many on Wall Street expected the first quarter to be much stronger for stocks than it turned out to be. The theory was that big financial firms had taken their hits in the final three months of 2007. However, as the first quarter has shown, the fallout from investments in risky and possibly worthless mortgage-backed securities has continued along with the uncertainty in the credit markets
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