Wall Street bleeds on a turbulent Tuesday

Dow posts biggest one day loss in over five years plunging 416 points

U.S. stock market witnessed its worst one-day performance since 2001 on Tuesday, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average, at one point, losing 200 points in less than a minute just an hour before closing bells were to ring. After a sell-off in China fueled concerns about growth, Wall Street was bruised and was left bleeding for the entire day. Dow, Nasdaq and S&P 500 tumbled 3.3%, 3.9% and 3.4% respectively for the day.

Concerns that tighter credit conditions in China and Japan might dampen global growth first sent Shanghai sliding 9% overnight before the sell-off spread to other markets. Higher oil prices and some disappointing economic news just worsened the situation further. Today's Dow loss was also the biggest percentage decline since the index fell 3.67% on 24 March, 2003 just before the United States invaded Iraq.

The suicide bombing attack at the main U.S. military base in Afghanistan just as Vice President Dick Cheney was visiting also rattled markets.

The Dow was down as much as 546 points (-4.3%) at one point, before bouncing back to close down 416 points. That was still the biggest one-day point decline since the markets reopened on 17 September, 2001 (after 9/11) when it fell by 684 points. With today’s trading, market decline wiped out all of the year's gains for the Dow and the S&P 500.

Ultimately for the day, The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed lower by 416.02 points at 12216.24, Nasdaq lower by 96.66 points at 2407.86 and S&P 500 lower by 50.33 points at 1399.04.

All 30 stocks in the Dow ended lower for the day along with 497 stocks in the S&P 500. The only winners were RadioShack and Questar. While Walt Disney was Dow’s biggest loser, the Dow component that suffered minimal loss was GE.

Trading volumes hit record levels on the New York Stock Exchange, where more than 2.3 billion shares exchanged hands. More than 3 billion shares traded on the tech-heavy Nasdaq stock market. Declining issues outpaced gainers by 29 to 4 on the NYSE and by 14 to 1 on the Nasdaq.

In addition, the New York Stock Exchange said that trading was disrupted by "intermittent technical problems" toward the end of the day. Most traders translated that to mean that the exchange's computers were overwhelmed by the volume of trading, and there were fears the problems would spill over into tomorrow's trading.