Wall Street Celebrates Record Year Traders, Investors Tally Gains As Bull Market Charges Toward ‘96

They laughed, they celebrated, they even sang.

Not at anyone’s New Year’s party, but at the New York Stock Exchange, where the last trades were executed for 1995, the best year for the Dow Jones Industrial Average since 1975 and for the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index since 1958.

Fittingly, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rallied late Friday to finish up 21.32 at 5,117.12. Broader indexes finished higher as well.

For the year, the Dow surged 1,282 points, or 33 percent. The NASDAQ composite rose 300 points on the year, or 40 percent, to 1052.14. The S&P 500 rose 156 points, or 34 percent, ending at 615.93.

While the remarkable gains of 1995 sparked some nervousness among investors, traders took encouragement from news of record amounts flowing into mutual funds in December, which bodes well for the market in January when investors typically hunt for bargains among smaller-capitalization stocks.

“It just kept going up and up and up,” said BT Brokerage trader Chris Willox. “Now everybody is waiting to see if all this money is going to pour into the market in January.”

Trading volume was low on U.S. exchanges Friday, dwindling as brokers and money managers, satisfied with some of the biggest returns they had ever seen in their lives, skipped town early for the three-day holiday weekend. Outside the exchange, swarms of tourists far outnumbered traders out on cigarette breaks.

No one said that meant things were exactly quiet.

At 2 p.m., traders on the floor of the NYSE broke into song, as is traditional for the last session of the year and sometimes on Christmas Eve. The tune is always the same, a little-known ballad called “Nellie” a vaudeville song dating to 1905, popularized in a 1941 Bing Crosby film, “The Birth of the Blues”:

“Wait till the sun shines, Nellie, when the clouds go drifting by. We will be happy, Nellie, don’t you sigh.”

Gary Greg Faro, a supervisor in the NYSE, described the “Nellie” as “very sentimental” to the crowd, none of whom was able to identify the song’s real origins, long before the markets performed as well as they did this year.

And sentiment all around was good, as tables in trading booths were overflowing with food in a symbolic feast off the year’s gains. As trading ended for the year, the Nasdaq was up 39.92 percent, the S&P 500 was up 34.11 percent, and the Dow Industrials were up 33.45 percent.

A bit of practical joking went on, another time-honored bit of year-end fun that seemed irresistible in a year as good as this. Most of it benign, the pranks consisted of powdering people’s shoes and sending false messages to traders’ beepers - telling them, for example, to pick up a package that doesn’t really exist at the front desk.

As trading tapered off, traders found themselves having a bit more of a lackadaisical afternoon than usual. It gave bond trader Charlie Giaquinto, dressed down in jeans, time to get a leisurely cup at Timothy’s Coffee across the street.

“The mood is one of relief,” said Giaquinto, who works for Robb Peck McCoey. “Everyone did well, and everyone’s going home on a good note.”

At least one tourist waiting on line in the icy cold to get into the NYSE said he was not so sure the average American is equally content.

“From the friends I talk to, there’s still that edge, an apprehension about the economy in general,” said John Evans of Southport, Conn.

Traders lingered over their cigarettes a little longer, musing that the “big guys” who had done really well were already gone for the year.

“I think everyone’s ready to go home for a long weekend,” said veteran trader Nicholas Gugliuzzi.