Bullish US stock market
August 26, 2015
The Dow surged more than 600 points on Wednesday, following losses on six consecutive trading days and marking the third biggest point gain ever and the largest since a session in 2011. The index was up 3.96 percent at the end of the day, after adding 400 points straight after trading began.
Germany's DAX ended the day down 1.29 percent and once again dropped below the 10,000-point-mark.
Markets in London and Paris were all down by more than 1 percent upon opening on Wednesday, but recovered fully in the afternoon, touching positive territory before sliding again.
The weak start was largely expected after volatile trading in Shanghai saw the market there fluctuate wildly between gains as high as 4.29 percent and losses as low as 3.85 percent.
Shanghai stocks eventually closed down 1.27 percent, a much less worse performance than the last three days of trading, in which investors saw roughly 20 percent of stock value wiped out.
Japan's Nikkei fared more favorably, rising 3.2 percent as investors went on a bargain hunt following six days of falling shares. Outside Japan, MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares also crept up 0.2 percent.
Market lag
In initial trade, London's benchmark FTSE 100 index had lost 1.3 percent, Frankfurt's DAX 30 tumbled 1.69 percent and the CAC 40 in Paris dropped 1.44 percent.
The lag in the German DAX left it 20 percent below a record high reached in April. Some of the biggest losses in Germany were felt by the software maker SAP and the luxury automaker BMW.
Commodities also fell sharply, with the price of copper dropping at the prospect of slowing demand from China, the world's leading consumer of metals.
Bank stocks also fell due to their exposure to the massive sell-off among Chinese investors.
But some analysts are still confident that a number of stocks could recover in a few months time. Strategists at Morgan Stanley, for instance, identified for clients 20 shares they considered to be "oversold." BMW was one of them.
cjc, hg /uhe (Reuters, AFP)