EDITOR'S NOTE
Wall Street closed out a wild year of trading with two major stock indexes hitting fresh record highs.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 196.92 points, or 0.7% to 30,606.48, a record. The S&P 500 gained 0.6% to end the day at a closing all-time high of 3,756.07. Still, the moves that took both market benchmarks to those levels were small compared to some of the sharp daily swings experienced throughout 2020.
The S&P 500 closed up or down at least 1% in 110 of this year's 253 trading days, compared to just 38 days in 2019. Those 110 daily swings include two rallies of more than 9% in March as well as a 12% drop in that same month.
At one point, the S&P 500 was down more than 30% this year before closing out 2020 with a 16.3% gain.
"To use an overused word, this has been unprecedented," said Sam Stovall, chief investment strategist at CFRA Research. "We've never had to deal with anything like this."
"If Rip Van Winkle woke up today, he would say, 'what a great year; we're up 15%. You can't beat that,'" Stovall added. "Then he'd open his statements and see the S&P 500 lost 20% in the first quarter, and then rose the exact same 20% in the second quarter he'd think there was a bug in the system. He'd be right, it was Covid."
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