MARKETS BACK IN POSITIVE TERRITORY AFTER SUMMER SWOON
NEW YORK — Maybe you shouldn’t have put your money under a mattress after all.
The stock market is back in the black for the year after a bruising late-August tumble that had investors worrying about their money in a way they hadn’t in four years.
A three-week surge in stocks has now lifted the Standard & Poor’s 500 index above where it was at the beginning of 2015 for the first time since the summer.
The S&P 500 fell 12 percent from its mid-July high to its depths in late August, as investors worried that slowing growth in China, along with continued economic weakness in Europe and Japan, would crush any hopes of stronger global growth.
It was the first correction in four years, and it looked like investors in the U.S. stock market could be on track for their first annual losses, including dividends, since 2008.
Then central bankers and stronger corporate profits helped turn things around. The world’s three biggest economies, the U.S., China and Europe, moved to push interest rates down or postpone expected rate increases. That gave investors more money to buy stocks and other assets, which in turn pushed up prices.
And what was thought to be a bleak U.S. corporate earnings season started to look a lot brighter in recent days, especially when tech giants Amazon and Google parent company Alphabet posted surprisingly strong profits this week.
“The tone of the market has changed from where we were a week ago or certainly a month ago,” said Erik Davidson, chief investment officer for Wells Fargo Private Bank.
While investors could have hoped for fatter returns by this point in 2015, they are now better off than if they had done nothing with their money.
Here’s a look at how $10,000 invested back in January in the stock market and in other common investments would have fared.