Analysts said the declines in Thursday’s session should be taken with a grain of salt due to light trading volume ahead of the market’s closure Friday for the New Year holiday and the incentive to sell stocks at the end of the year to book losses for tax purposes.
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The S&P 500 Index ended 2015 down 0.7% for the year, better than the 7% decline the benchmark index hovered at in September as a result of the summer’s market volatility, but far short of the 11% gain for 2014.
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The Dow Jones industrial average also closed out the year with a loss.
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In all, investment managers and economists say the break-even year for equities could be a start to more subdued stock market returns after roughly six years of gains.
Major U.S. indexes declined on Thursday, the last day of the year, putting a main market benchmark slightly in the red for 2015.
USA stocks fell Wednesday, as a retreat in oil prices dragged down energy companies’ shares.
The S&P 500 index showed one new 52-week highs and two new lows, while the Nasdaq recorded 26 new highs and 61 new lows.
Consumer stocks also took the top three spots on the Dow, led by Nike’s 30 per cent increase in 2015. It marked the first year of losses for the Dow since 2008.
The S&P 500 was down 0.95% at 2,043.86, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq composite was 1.15% lower at 5,007.41.
The most recent major rally for the Dow on the final trading day of the year came in 2012 when it climbed 1.3%.
Dow component Wal Mart’s shares were down half a percent at US$62 in very thin premarket trading.
Semiconductor stocks saw significant weakness on the day, with the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index sliding by 1.4 percent. The markets recouped most of their lost ground within a few weeks.
“I think this is going to be a short-lived bounce in energy prices”, said Robert Pavlik, chief market strategist at Boston Private Wealth.
Energy companies fell the most among the 10 sectors in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index, 1.5 percent. The seven worst performers in the S&P 500 this month are energy stocks.
Crude oil and natural gas prices recovered some of their losses from the day before.
US crude oil futures settled up 44 cents, or 1.2 percent, at $37.04 a barrel. Brent crude, used to price worldwide oils, rose 33 cents to $36.79 a barrel in London. While the U.K.’s FTSE 100 Index fell by 0.5 percent, the French CAC 40 Index dropped by 0.9 percent.
In a reversal of one of 2015’s major trends, oil shares moved higher, with the S&P energy sector up 0.34 percent and alone among gainers.
The market’s torpor is likely to be broken next week as investors will return from the holiday to a swath of data, including gauges on the manufacturing and services industries, the monthly jobs report and minutes from the Fed meeting that ended with the first rate increase since 2006.
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Treasury yields held lower, with the 2-year yield (U.S.:US2Y) around 1.06 percent and the 10-year yield (U.S.:US10Y) near 2.27 percent as of 3:47 p.m., ET.
