Stocks drop, Dow's loss for year first since '02 (Reuter's Headline, not mine)
Much the end of year drop by the DOW was caused by General Motors disastrous end of year performance. GM is a heavy component of the DOW. Overall, it was an OK year for the stock market and if you are invested in the major indexes like Vanguard 500, Schwab 1000, etc. you'll have a decent return. As usual, the media attempts to make it look like a disaster. The NASDAQ and the S&P500 were up, btw!
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NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. stocks fell in the year's final trading session on Friday, pushing the Dow Jones industrial average to its first loss since 2002, while both the broad S&P 500 and the Nasdaq Composite Index booked gains for the third straight year.
The Dow declined 0.61 percent in 2005, breaking its streak of back-to-back gains for 2003 and 2004.
Meanwhile, the S&P 500 rose for a third consecutive year, advancing 3 percent -- just one-third of its 9 percent gain last year -- and its smallest annual gain since 1987.
The tech-laced Nasdaq also climbed for a third straight year, rising 1.37 percent, helped by multi-digit gains in bellwethers including Google Inc., up about 117 percent for the year, and Apple Computer Inc., up about 122 percent for 2005, on a split-adjusted basis.
In Friday's trading, though, Google ended the regular session down 1.3 percent, or $5.29, at $414.86, while Apple rose 0.6 percent, or 44 cents, to $71.89.
In the broad S&P 500 index, the best-performing sector in 2005 was energy, with a 29.1 percent gain, buoyed by crude oil's jump to a record price of $70.85 a barrel in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in August. The worst-performing S&P 500 sectors were communications, with a 9 percent drop, and consumer discretionary, with a 7.3 percent slide.
"This was not a year for macro-sector bets -- whoever bet on sectors, or indexes other than energy, got extremely frustrated," said James Paulsen, chief investment strategist at Wells Capital Management in Minneapolis, with $155 billion in assets under management. "This was the year of individual stocks."
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幸運わんわん Luckydog or Yukiwanwan in Japanese 
Originally Posted by luckydog
-0.35 -0.69%
