Wall St sharply lower on China fears
Thursday, 9 July 2015
US stocks ended sharply lower on Wednesday as market turmoil in China eclipsed Greece's debt crisis, while the New York Stock Exchange suffered a major outage. Fears that a rout in Chinese stocks could seriously harm the country's economy and spread beyond its borders pushed the S&P 500 below its 200-day moving average for the first time since October and into negative territory for 2015. The Dow Jones industrial average .DJI fell 261.49 points, or 1.47 per cent, to end at 17,515.42. The S&P 500 .SPX lost 34.65 points, or 1.66 per cent, to 2,046.69 and the Nasdaq Composite .IXIC dropped 87.70 points, or 1.75 per cent, to 4,909.76. Declining issues outnumbered advancing ones on the NYSE by 2,506 to 493, for a 5.08-to-1 ratio on the downside; on the Nasdaq, 2,354 issues fell and 461 advanced for a 5.11-to-1 ratio favoring decliners. The benchmark S&P 500 index posted 2 new 52-week highs and 25 new lows; the Nasdaq Composite recorded 24 new highs and 149 new lows. About 7.1 billion shares traded on all US platforms, according to Reuters.