NEW YORK — The stock market had a fitting end to a stellar but erratic third quarter as investors still ambivalent about the economy shuttled between bouts of buying and selling.
Wall Street’s major indexes ended the July-September period with big gains Wednesday as investors placed more bets that the recovery will keep gathering momentum. The Dow Jones industrials and Standard & Poor’s 500 index both ended the quarter with gains of more than 15 percent, even as they pulled back modestly on the quarter’s last day.
The gains didn’t always come easily during the quarter, and the Dow’s performance is proof. The average, which had its best three-month showing in nearly 11 years, came within 82 points of reclaiming 10,000, only to fall back as investors’ optimism was chilled by news that housing and manufacturing weren’t as strong as many had thought.
On the quarter’s last day, stocks got an early lift from an improvement in the government’s report on the second-quarter gross domestic product, then tumbled on news of a surprise drop in the September Chicago Purchasing Managers index, which measures Midwestern manufacturing.
Analysts who are generally upbeat about the market’s prospects for the fourth quarter say the pattern is likely to hold: Bad news will hit the market, reminding investors of the economy’s fragility, and stocks will slide. But within a few days, or even the same day, they’ll recover as investors grab hold of the fact that no one expects the recovery, or stocks, to have an unbroken path upward.
“Any legitimate decline in the market is just seen as a buying opportunity,” said David Waddell, senior investment strategist and chief executive of Waddell & Associates. “That pattern has continued now ever since the rally began.”
On Wednesday, the Dow ended down 29.92, 0.3 percent, at 9,712.28 after falling nearly 134 points. The S&P 500 fell 3.53, 0.3 percent, to 1,057.08. The Nasdaq composite fell 1.62, 0.1 percent, to 2,122.42.
The rally began in March, with the first signs that the economy might be recovering.
The market’s stats show how huge the rally has been:
• The Dow is up 15 percent for the quarter, its best gain since the fourth quarter of 1998. It’s up 48.4 percent from its 12-year low of 6,547.05 in March. From a year ago, when the financial crisis worsened, the index is down 10.2 percent. The Dow is still down 21.4 percent from its peak of 14,164.53 in October 2007, but that’s quite an improvement considering it fell 53.8 percent from that record.
• The S&P 500 is up 15 percent for the quarter and 56.3 percent from March. It is down 9.1 percent from a year ago and 32.5 percent from its high of 1,565.15 in October 2007.
• The Nasdaq, which has a big concentration of technology stocks, was the best performer. It rose 15.7 percent in the quarter and is up 67.3 percent from March.
