By this metric, the S&P 500’s final hour of trading was its worst in 6 ½ years

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U.S. stocks sharply pared their gains in the final minutes of trading on Monday, with major indexes going from a sharp and broad-based advance to nearly negative territory, in a late-day swing, the magnitude of which hasn’t been seen for years.

Stocks, which had already been trading off their highs of the session in the final hour of trading, further pared gains amid a report by the New York Times that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had raided the office of Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer.

At the apex of the session, the Dow Jones Industrial Average












DJIA, +0.19%










 spiked 1.8% while the S&P 500 index












SPX, +0.33%










 had been up 1.9%. The Nasdaq Composite Index












COMP, +0.51%










 jumped 2.3% at its session high. However, they ended well off those levels: The Dow closed with a gain of just 0.2%, while the S&P closed up 0.3% and the Nasdaq rose 0.5% for the day, retaining less than a quarter of its intraday peak.

Such a swing is extremely rare. According to Bespoke Investment Group, which looked at sessions where the S&P had been up at least 1.5% two hours before the close of trading, Monday’s swing represented the worst final hour of trading for the benchmark index since Sept. 27, 2011.

A previous tweet, which Bespoke appears to have been deleted and then updated, initially indicated that the final hour had been the S&P 500’s worst since May 2014.

While political uncertainty may have been the driver of the decline, politics had also been the primary cause behind the earlier rally: stocks had gained on signs that trade tensions between the U.S. and China may be easing. A rally in technology shares also supported Wall Street, contributing to the outsize midday gain in the Nasdaq.





Source : MTV