For the quarter, the blue-chip average sits on a loss of 0.9%, its first quarterly decline since the second quarter of 2005.

The Dow first rose by over 65 points in morning trade Friday, before falling by over 100 points and then recovering some ground in the afternoon.

"Near-term, there are too many uncertainties," said Owen Fitzpatrick, head of the U.S. equity group at Deutsche Bank. "There are a lot of issues that aren't resolved about the housing market, subprime mortgages and geopolitical tensions."

Stocks have been rocked since late February amid mounting concerns that a meltdown in the subprime mortgage market will spread, restricting lending, cramping consumption and further weakening a slowing U.S. economy.

"The market is going to be in choppy waters, at least for the next couple of months," said Fitzpatrick. Next week, the market will be on the lookout for negative announcements from companies forced to ratchet down earnings outlooks, "given the weakness that we've already seen in the economy," he said.

On Friday, Dec. 15, 2006, shares in Apparel Manufacturing Associates, Inc. (APPM) closed at $.06, with a trading volume of 3,500 shares. After a weekend spam campaign distributed emails proclaiming, "Huge news expected out on APPM, get in before the wire, We're taking it all the way to $1.00," trading volume on Monday, Dec. 18, 2006, hit 484,568 shares with the price spiking to over 19 cents a share. Two days later the price climbed to $.45. By Dec. 27, 2006, the price was back down to $.10 on trading volume of 65,350 shares.

On Dec. 19, 2006, trading in Goldmark Industries, Inc. (GDKI), closed at $.17 on trading volume of 126,286 shares. On Dec. 20, 2006, the spam campaign started, with e-mail proclaiming "GDKI IS MAKING EVERYONE BANK!," and setting a 5-day price target of $2. By Dec. 28, 2006, spam emails boasted of the price spike that had already been achieved -- "$.28 (Up 152% in 2 days!!!)" -- and promised a 5-day price target of $1. That same day, GDKI closed at $.35 on a volume of more than 5 million shares. By January 9, 2007, the closing share price was back down to $.15.

A spam campaign in Healtheuniverse, Inc. (HLUN) stock began on Sept. 4, 2006, with emails incorporating a Healtheuniverse press release proclaiming that HLUN was "focused on being the first to commercialize stem cell applications in the $15 billion worldwide plastic surgery and cosmetic surgery market." On Sept. 7, 2006, HLUN closed at $.12 per share on trading volume of 3,000 shares. The spam campaign accelerated, and HLUN shares spiked to $.22 per share on Sept. 11, 2006, with over 2.2 million shares trading hands. By Sept. 22, 2006, the closing price had dropped back down to $.11.

The advance Tuesday treated Wall Street traders to what had become a rare sight - the color green splashed across their computer screens that show stock prices, instead of last week's red. But, after being knocked about by erratic market shifts in recent sessions, there was still a sense this might not be the recovery everyone is waiting for.

"I don't think we should get too used to seeing all this green," said Jay Suskind, head trader at Ryan Beck & Co. "This market feels to me like it doesn’t have legs, there just doesn’t seem to be that euphoria out there. There is still trepidation."

The Dow rose 157.18, or 1.30 percent, to 12,207.59, after dropping 581 points over the past week. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index was up 21.29, or 1.55 percent, at 1,395.41 in its biggest advance since July.

A computer glitch triggered a sudden plunge in the Dow Jones industrial average at mid-afternoon Tuesday, turning an already bad day in stocks into a head-turning spectacle.

Dow Jones & Co., the media company that manages the well-known index of 30 blue chip stocks, said it discovered shortly before 2 p.m. that its computers weren't properly handling the day's huge volume in trades at the New York Stock Exchange.

It switched to a backup computer, and the result was a massive swoon in the index as the secondary system took over processing shortly before 3 p.m.

The Dow plunged about 200 points almost instantly, and was down as much as 546 points - its worst single-session decline in more than five years, and one that sent the blue chips into negative territory for the year.

"I've never seen a collapse like that, and I've only been doing this for 47 years," said Alfred E. Goldman, chief market strategist at A.G. Edwards & Sons Inc.