S&P 500 Is Unchanged, Wall Street Forever Altered: Chart of Day

By Nick Baker and Jeff Kearns

Sept. 20 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. stocks were little changed this week.

The CHART OF THE DAY shows the swings in the Standard & Poor's 500 Index that left the equity benchmark up 0.3 percent since Sept. 12. That's the smallest weekly move for the S&P 500 in a month, even as it posted the biggest daily plunges in seven years and the steepest two-day surge since the aftermath of the October 1987 stock-market crash.

The index tumbled more than 4.7 percent twice after Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.'s bankruptcy, Bank of America Corp.'s takeover of Merrill Lynch & Co. and the government seizure of American International Group Inc. The S&P 500 ended the week by jumping 8.5 percent in two days on the government's plan to purge banks of bad assets and crack down on short sellers.

``We moved around a lot to get nowhere,'' said Douglas Peta, a New York-based market strategist at J&W Seligman & Co., which manages about $20 billion. ``If you were away for a week and just came back and looked at the indexes, you'd say to the person next to you, `nothing happened while I was gone, huh?'''

The S&P 500 added 3.38 points to 1,255.08 this week.

To contact the reporters on this story: Nick Baker in New York at nbaker7@bloomberg.net; Jeff Kearns in New York at jkearns3@bloomberg.net.