Wall Street: A New Kind of Bull

It seemed like a different kind of bull—more Ferdinand than Taurus-but it kept Wall Street hopping all week. The Dow-Jones industrial average of 30 blue-chip stocks, which two weeks ago had retreated after briefly cracking its historic May high of 939.62, moved up to new records on five consecutive days. On the final trading day, the average climbed all the way to 959.39 before a flurry of profit-taking drove it back to a 952.42 close. Even so, it was up a strong 11.74 points for the week, the biggest gain in seven weeks. It stood only 471 points away from that once impossible-looking year-end goal of 1,000.

Even more spectacular than the gain in prices was the week’s 43,138,100-share volume, the third highest in New York Stock Exchange history—topped only by the volume of the previous week and of the fateful week of Nov. 2, 1929. For all that, the market was diffident and nervous, tugged at from hour to hour by investors changing their stockholdings for tax reasons, by speculators covering short sales of stock and by customers who kept moving into and out of the low-priced glamour stocks.

Still, many a blue-chip stock, among them IBM, General Electric and General Motors, reached new highs. Though the market had gained 62½ points in the past two months, increasing the chance for a corrective dip, Wall Street remained determinedly optimistic. Whatever happens to stock prices, trading activity seems to have reached a new high plateau, where commission profits are keeping the brokers happy.