Uncertain investors send stocks on dramatic rollercoaster ride

NEW YORK -- In another dramatic day on Wall Street, stocks continued to fluctuate in volatile trading as investors remained uncertain what to do in this bruising bear market.

Stocks seesawed Friday, with the Dow Jones industrials spinning from an early loss of nearly 700 points to a 100-point late-session advance while investors looked for bargains after eight straight days of massive losses. The Dow was still headed for its worst week ever, though, as investors worried about credit markets that remain near paralysis.

The hair-trigger mentality of the market was evident from the opening bell. The Dow plunged almost 700 points right at the open, mounted a full recovery that put the Dow in the black for a few minutes, before selling off again. The Dow staged another recovery in late trading and bounced in and out of positive territory in the last hour of trading.

In late trading, the Dow was down 45.56, or 0.5%, to 8,533.63. At its low point Friday, the Dow was down 696 at 7,882.51, just 60 points above its low in Wall Street's last bear market, 7,286.27, reached Oct. 9, 2002.

The Standard & Poor's 500 index fell 8.70, or 1.0%, to 901.22, while the Nasdaq composite index dropped 3.03, or 0.2%, 1,642.09.

The volatility added to the uncertainty as the Dow has dropped 28% in the past 10 trading sessions, eclipsing the nearly 22.6% drop it experienced during the one-day crash in 1987. The current two-week sell-off has been so severe and wiped out so much stockholder wealth, that some Wall Street strategists are starting to use the word "crash" to describe the carnage.

"It's safe to say that the 25%-decline over the last 10 days is indeed a crash," Paul Hickey of Bespoke Investment Group declared in a note to clients.

A total of more than $8.6 trillion in stock market wealth had been wiped out by midday Friday since the market's peak last October, according to the DJ Wilshire 5000 "wealth" measure.

Todd Clark, a trader at Nollenberger Capital Partners, says traders suffered "a little bit of paralysis and numbness" when stocks plunged at the opening of trading. While the Dow's massive reversal raised some hopes that the hoped-for selling climax might have occurred, marking a market bottom, Clark is hesitant to declare that the selling is over.