Stocks Get With the Program

The disparity between chaotic world events and Wednesday's ultimately positive session for stocks brings about a perfect Buffalo Springfield moment: You know, "Stop, hey, what's that sound? Everyone look what's going down."

For what it's worth, what's going down are major global stock proxies (save the Nikkei 225, which enjoyed a technical bounce Wednesday). European bourses got rocked again, with London's FTSE 100 shedding 4.8%.

Great Britain, the U.S.' staunchest ally in the Iraq situation, offered some new proposals to resolve the diplomatic bottleneck in the United Nations, including a televised mea culpa by Saddam. Meanwhile, Serbia's prime minister was assassinated, there were protests against U.S. troops in Turkey, and little improvement of ongoing crises in Venezuela, the Korean peninsula and Israel. ("There's battle lines being drawn. Nobody's right if everybody's wrong.")

Despite all that, program-related buying, some shrewd technically driven short-covering and a touch of unjustified optimism sent major stock proxies modestly higher and well off their session lows Wednesday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average finished up 0.4% to 7552.07 after trading as low as 7416.64. The S&P 500 gained 0.4% to 804.19 vs. its nadir of 788.90 and the Nasdaq Composite ended up 0.6% to 1279.24 after trading as low as 1253.22 and breaching its Feb. 13 intraday low of 1262.

ExxonMobil (XOM Quote) was among the Dow's biggest restraint, falling 1.5% after J.P. Morgan downgraded several major oil producers. Royal Dutch (RD Quote) fell 3.4% and the Amex Oil & Gas Index lost 2.2%.

Other individual movers included Black Box(BBOX Quote), which tumbled 37% after warning its fiscal fourth-quarter results would not meet expectations.

Shares were bolstered early by false rumors of Osama bin Laden's capture and later by CNN's report that the U.S. is only one Security Council vote away from the nine needed for passage of a second resolution. U.N. support for the use of force against Iraq is considered critical for British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who is facing stiff political opposition to the alternative. Either way, the U.S. wants a vote by week's end, CNN reported.