Rally ho! The stock market saw huge gains at the end of trading today with the Dow closing up 889.35 points (10.9 percent), the S&P 500 up 91.59 (10.8 percent) and the Nasdaq up 143.57 (9.5 percent). The morning and early afternoon sessions saw the markets boomerang from mild gains to mild losses before the surge started around 2 PM EST.
The Dow had its second best point gain ever as it closed above 9000 points for the first time since falling below that mark last week. (Its 936 point rally a couple weeks ago was the largest ever.) The S&P 500's surge was also its second largest ever point-wise. The Nasdaq's rally however failed to crack the top 10 for best days it's ever had point-wise (though percentage-wise it was its fourth best day ever).
While analysts were uncertain if any one catalyst caused today's rally, it seems likely that the combination of multi-year lows for many stocks combined with the Federal Reserve expected to cut interest rates tomorrow afternoon got things going.
Among tech stocks, the day's big winners included:
- Google (up 11.92 percent)
- Microsoft (which has had an avalanche of new announcements at its PDC event -- up 9.07 percent)
- Apple (up 8.49 percent)
- Netflix (up 14.66 percent)
- HP (up 12.54 percent)
- IBM (up 9.57 percent)
- Oracle (up 11.73 percent)
- Sony (up 14.65 percent)
- Adobe (up 14.34 percent)
- Dell (up 12.01 percent)
- RIM (up 10.15 percent)
- NVIDIA (up 15.06 percent)
- Intel (up 11.30 percent)
- eBay (up 9.22 percent)
Just for a dose of reality, as we all know, tomorrow could easily flip that mountain of gains back into an abyss. Feel free to come talk about it at our Downturn Roundtable event tomorrow morning. (Update: the event is sold out).