NEW YORK – U.S. stocks headed higher on the first trading day of the New Year, after ending 2008 with near-record losses.
At 1:20 p.m. in New York trading, the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index was up 2 percent at 921.2 points; the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 165.65 points, or 1.9 percent, at 8,941.02; and the Russell 2000 Index of small U.S. companies was up 1.2 percent, according to Bloomberg News. And at 1:41 p.m., the Nasdaq Composite Index was up 41.09 points, or 2.6 percent, at 1,618.12.
Energy companies led the today’s gains, boosted by rising oil and natural gas prices, with Exxon Mobil Corp. and Chevron Corp. posting the biggest increases in the S&P 500. “The stocks are very attractively priced,” Robert Schaeffer, a money manager at Becker Capital Management Inc. in Portland, Ore., told Bloomberg News. “The long-term supply-demand case for oil is very bullish.”
Last year, U.S. stock markets lost six years of gains as shareholders saw $6.9 trillion in equity evaporate. The S&P 500 ended the year down 38.5 percent, in its biggest one-year loss since 1937, even after gaining 22 percent from its 11-year low on Nov. 20. The Dow ended 2008 down 33.8 percent in its worst showing since 1931.
Discount retailers, led by Wal-Mart Stores Inc.; restaurant operator McDonald’s Corp.; and brewers and tobacco companies whose value was boosted by takeovers, were among the few stocks to gain value in 2008, Bloomberg News reported. But recent government moves to bolster the economy, both here and abroad, seem to have calmed investor fears.
“The worst has been seen,” Jeffrey Saut, chief investment strategist at Raymond James & Associates in St. Petersburg, Fla., told Bloomberg Television. Still, he added, “I’m not looking for a super year in 2009.”
