Wall Street ended the year in the red as the Dow and S&P 500 both hit new highs.
Wall Street closed Thursday (Dec. 31) with the Dow surging 0.65 percent to sit at 30,606, the S&P 500 up 0.64 percent to finish at 3,756 and the Nasdaq up 0.14 percent to close at 12,888.
The Dow Jones and S&P 500 both set all-time records on the last day of 2020. The S&P 500 climbed more than 66 percent from its low on March 23 of this year when the new coronavirus outbreak was raging, and is up 16.3 percent this year. The Dow Jones is up 7.3% this year, and the Nasdaq has scampered up 43.6%. It was also the Nasdaq’s biggest annual gain since 2009.
Wall Street thus said goodbye to a turbulent year with a bright performance. The U.S. stock market broke through the epidemic clouds and rose in part due to the massive fiscal and monetary stimulus package passed by the government and progress in the development of a new coronavirus vaccine.
“It’s still been a bull year for broad indices, despite the madness that’s been going on in the real world,” Mike Zigmont, head of research trading at Harvest Volatility Management, told Reuters. “It feels very much like investors think the world has changed forever, that the global pandemic of the new coronavirus was the catalyst and that investors now know who the winners and losers are and are moving forward.”
Still, Thursday’s numbers are a reminder that the number of initial claims for unemployment assistance in the U.S. each week is still at its peak from 2007 to 2009 during the Great Recession and that the economy still has a long way to go to recover.
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