Wall St. totters at last trading day of '22 as Nasdaq shed a third of market cap

• Financial

On Friday, all three key indices of Wall St. had closed out the session lower, as recession worries appeared to be taking a greater-than-anticipated toll on investors’ morale, while Wall St. also had booked its sharpest annual percentage decline since the era of great financial depression of 2007-2009.

Apart from the Wall Street, MSCI’s global stock indices were pounded as much as 20 per cent over the year, as investors appeared to be awaiting further bedlam over 2023. Nonetheless, US Treasury Yields rose as recession frets mount, eventually handing out a boost to US bond notes with the US benchmark 10-year Treasury bond yields posting their largest annual gain in decades.

In the matter of the fact, Friday’s downward spiral in Wall St. was largely catalysed by worries over growing uncertainty on a hawkish US Fed alongside concerns over China demand despite its latest move to open up the economy after a three-year long pandemic-led zero-Covid policy.

Since China had eased the country’s pandemic regulation after such a long time, a large portion of Chinese economy had not had the chance to develop immunity against the Omicron variant, which eventually is resulting in millions of cases every day, however, death rates remain significantly low with just one death reported over past week, suggested analysts.

However, many countries have been imposing travel restrictions on Chinese travellers, which eventually added to a holocaust on investors’ morale.

Wall St. ends final trading day of 2022 lower

Citing statistics, in the day’s Wall St.

closing bell, Dow fell 0.22 per cent to 33,147.25 and Wall St. benchmark S&P 500 shed 0.25 per cent to 3,839.5, while tech-heavy Nasdaq dipped 0.11 per cent. Nonetheless, Nasdaq lost nearly a third of its market cap this year, while S&P 500 shed a fifth of its market cap in 2022.

Dow fell 8.7 per cent over the year. Meanwhile, addressing to a growing uncertainty among the US money markets, director of Wealth Management Research D. A. Davidson in Seattle, James Ragan said, “here's uncertainty on the fundamentals, what the economy is going to do, what the Fed is going to do, what earnings are going to do.

But also, is the market going to start off with a sell-off in January? There's that fear out there so, portfolio managers and traders are just not wanting to be in a real risk-on position going into the new year. That's what's been happening today and all week”.