swainer --
Thanks very much for your very helpful clarification. Here is the
statement you are looking for, as reworded in my clarification request
and with all of my blanks filled in:
92 percent of the 499 stocks in the S&P 500 that were traded for the
entire year of 2003 ended up for that year. For the 24 years that
Standard & Poors has kept such statistics, this is the highest
percentage for any year. (Second place goes to 1995, when 86 percent
of S&P stocks rose.) During this almost quarter-century, in only four
other years have at least 400 stocks in that index rose. Those years
were 1985, 1991, 1995 and 1997.
The source for this information is "The Bounceback Year," by Floyd
Norris, New York Times (Late Edition, East Coast), New York, NY,
January 2, 2004, at page C1.
Because of copyright restrictions, I cannot reproduce the entire
article, which I accessed by keyword searching on the ProQuest
subscription research service, which is available through my local
public library. Since the article is from an edition of the New York
Times that was published less than three weeks ago, you should have no
problem acquiring access to a hard copy from a public library. The
article is also available online from the New York Times for $2.95
(although the graphics associated with the hard-copy article will not
be included). Simply go to the home page at the Times Web site, enter
"The Bounceback Year" in the search box near the top of the page and
follow the ordering procedure. Here is a link to that page:
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
For your immediate use, consistent with copyright law, I can provide
you with the following brief excerpts from that article, which should
be sufficient for you to fashion an appropriate direct quote that will
serve your purposes:
"Of the 499 stocks in the S.&P. 500 that were traded for the entire
year, 92 percent went up. In the 24 years that S.&P. has been keeping
track of that statistic, that is the best performance ever, exceeding
the old record of 86 percent set in 1995."
"This is the fifth time since Standard & Poor's began keeping the
statistic in 1980 that at least 400 stocks in the index have risen;
the other years were 1985, 1991, 1995 and 1997. In each case, the
index rose the following year . . . ."
"The Bounceback Year," by Floyd Norris, New York Times (Late Edition,
East Coast), New York, NY, January 2, 2004, at page C1.
Also for your immediate use, here are summaries of some other factual
material that is relevant to your question and that is further
explained in the Times article:
The S. & P. finished 2003 with a gain for the year of 26.7 percent,
which was 27 percent below its peak in March 2000.
If one removes the "weighting" from the index so that each company
regardless of its size is considered to affect the index equally, it
rose 38.7 percent to an all-time high, its highest rise of the 24
years of S.&P. record-keeping. This result means that the smaller
companies in the index rose at a higher rate than the giant companies
that disproportionately affect the performance of the overall index.
Most individual stocks in the index are at a level higher that they
were at the peak in 2000.
The volatility of the index during 2003 (that is, the strength of the
up and down movements along the way) declined as compared with recent
years, although it was still higher that the peak volatility period of
the early 1990s.
Large technology stocks led the 2003 recovery, although some are still
more than 50% off of their 2000 highs.
Every one of the 10 "economic sectors" represented in the S.&P. 500
rose in 2003, after all had fallen in 2003.
Search Strategy:
I began with a variety of Google searches, which unsurprisingly return
a lot of information on the performance of the stock markets in 2003,
but not information that fit the precise terms of your question. As I
said in my clarification request, this is not surprising because the
difficulty and relatively less usefulness of compiling such
information in the broader markets makes it unlikely that it has been
published or even compiled routinely.
The most useful of my Google searches was the following, which, if you
are interested, would lead you to much other information on market
performance in 2003:
"percent of * stocks" finished higher 2003
://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=%22percent+of+*+stocks%22+finished+higher+2003
(The asterisk in the search terms was included so that the results of
this single search would return sites where phrases with any "wild
card" word in place of the asterisk were found, such as "percent of
NYSE stocks" or "percent of NASDAQ stocks" or "percent of the stocks
in the S.&P. 500")
As noted above, I then searched newspaper databases available online
through my public library. After many searches with a variety of
search terms, I found the New York Times article using the terms "500
index 2003 percent".
Based on our "conversation" using the clarification feature, I am
confident that the above is exactly the information you are seeking.
If anything is unclear, please ask for clarification of answer before
rating.
markj-ga |
