NEW YORK (AP) — Big-name stocks rallied back today, surging into the close amid hopes Wall Street hit bottom in last week's punishing selloff. Most other stocks fell again, however, as bargain hunters remained leery of smaller companies.
According to preliminary calculations, the battered NASDAQ composite index jumped a record 217.68 points to 3,538.97, nearly all of it coming over the final hour of trading.
The Dow Jones industrial average rose 276.74 to 10,582.51, recovering nearly half of Friday's record one-day point drop of 617.78.
Leading technology stocks such as Intel and Cisco Systems dominated the 6.5 percent gain by the Nasdaq index, which last week lost one quarter of its value in a scary selling frenzy.
But while investors showed renewed interest in many of the big and popular companies that tumbled last week, the bias remained negative on the broad market, where declining issues outnumbered advancers by nearly a 3-to-2 margin.
Still, it was encouraging to see signs of stability, especially since foreign markets had tumbled overnight in reaction to Friday's brutal slide on Wall Street, which sliced a record 617 points off the Dow and a record 355 points off the NASDAQ .
Japan's Nikkei stock average fell 6.98 percent. In afternoon trading, Germany's DAX index fell 0.38 percent, Britain's FT-SE 100 fell 2.97 percent, and France's CAC-40 fell 0.09 percent.
Last week, worried that rising inflation and interest rates will cut into company profits, investors began dumping stocks in just about every sector of the market along with the speculative high-flyers from the Internet boom. The Dow was left 12 percent below its record high, while the NASDAQ fell to 34 percent below the record it reached March 10.
Possibly helping sentiment today were some more strong profit reports on the first three months of the year, this time from Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, Eastman Kodak and Ford Motor.