US stocks ending ’15 mostly flat, capping volatile year

Associated Press

The stock market took investors for a wild ride in 2015, but in the end it was a trip to nowhere.

Despite veering between record highs and the steepest dive in four years, the stock market is on track to end the year essentially flat. That means if you invested in a fund that tracks the Standard & Poor’s 500 index, you have little to show for the past 12 months.

“It’s been mildly disappointing,” said Michael Baele, managing director at the Private Client Reserve at U.S. Bank. “Any time that you come in toward the end of the year close to flat, you always want a little bit more.”

The market got 2015 off to a slow start as investors worried about falling crude oil prices, flat earnings growth and when and how quickly the Federal Reserve would begin raising interest rates.

By May, the major indexes were hitting new highs. Even the Nasdaq bested its dot-com high-water mark set in March 2000.

The market didn’t stay in milestone territory for long, though.

Worries about slowing growth in China and elsewhere gave reason for the Fed to pause and for investors to fret, even as the U.S. economy continued to create jobs and consumer confidence improved. Weak company earnings, largely due to the strong dollar and falling oil prices, didn’t do much for the market’s confidence.

By August, the anxiety had deepened and the market dropped sharply. The three major U.S. indexes went into a correction, commonly defined as a loss of at least 10 percent from a recent peak, for the first time in four years.

That slide didn’t last long, either.

Within several weeks, the market mostly had bounced back. The Nasdaq composite returned to positive territory for the year, while the Dow average and S&P 500 remained slightly in the red until December.

In the weeks that followed, the S&P 500 inched back into positive territory, leaving the Dow as the only major market indicator negative for the year.

Including dividends, the S&P 500 is on track to return 2 percent, after a return of 13.7 percent in 2014.

“There was a lot of news that kept hitting the market, and the market kept shrugging it all off and hung in there,” said J.J. Kinahan, chief strategist at TD Ameritrade. “I’d say, given all that the market faced this year, it was pretty strong.”