Up-and-down stocks plunge amid sell-off

Stocks are back in the red for the year after another wave of selling hit Wall Street on Friday.

The latest plunge came at the end of an unusually turbulent week of trading that had one huge gain sandwiched between massive losses.

A three-week slide has left the benchmark S&P 500 index on track for its worst month since February 2009, right before the stock market hit bottom following the 2008 financial crisis.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell nearly 300 points and the S&P 500, a benchmark for many index funds, is now down 9.3 percent from its September peak. That’s just shy of what Wall Street calls a “correction,” or a drop of 10 percent or more from a peak. The last S&P 500 correction happened in February.

The stock market has whipsawed this week, with the Dow slumping 500 points over the first two days of the week, plunging 608 on Wednesday, soaring 401 points Thursday and then plunging again Friday. The ups and downs came during the busiest week for third-quarter company earnings.

“We’re going through this transition where, earlier in the year, the corporate earnings results were just a blowout and now they’re more mixed,” said David Lefkowitz, senior equity strategist Americas at UBS Global Wealth Management. “That’s causing some of this volatility.”

The S&P 500 index slid 46.88 points, or 1.7 percent, to 2,658.69.

The Dow dropped 296.24 points, or 1.2 percent, to 24,688.31. The average was briefly down 539 points.

The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite lost 151.12 points, or 2.1 percent, to 7,167.21. The Russell 2000 index of smaller-company stocks gave up 16.58 points, or 1.1 percent, to 1,483.82. The S&P 500 and Dow are now down for the year again.