S&P 500 = 1254.05

There’s no other way to say it — today was a wipe-out for stocks. The S&P 500 plunged 32.89 points to close at 1,254.05.

That’s a loss of 2.56% which is the index’s worst loss since August 11th of last year. The market has lost all of its gain for the year. The S&P 500 is currently 0.29% lower than where it was on December 31st. The market has now fallen for seven sessions in a row.

Once again, it was the cyclicals that bore most of the pain. The Morgan Stanley Cyclicals Index (^CYC) dropped by 3.72%. The CYC is now below 1,000 and the index has shed 12.8% since July 7th.

Despite the new loss among cyclicals, that group has been suffering for a while. The losses today seemed fairly evenly distributed. I didn’t see many stocks down more than 5%. Trading volume on the Nasdaq ran 17-to-1 negative.

So what did well? That’s easy. Gold, for one. The yellow metal jumped to $1,644.50 an ounce. It wasn’t that long ago that the S&P 500 and gold were tracking each other. Gold is up even more after hours.

Bonds also had a field day. The five-year Treasury yield dropped to 1.23% and the 10-year yield is down to 2.62%. Both are the lowest readings since November.

The 30-year yield is down to 3.92% which is the lowest yield since last October.

Posted by on August 2nd, 2011 at 5:14 pm


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