Wall Street dips but trading volatile; bond prices rise

By Caroline Valetkevitch

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. stocks dipped modestly on Tuesday, swinging wildly between positive and negative territory, a day after the Dow and S&P 500 indexes saw their biggest one-day declines in more than six years, while a world stock index dropped more than 1 percent.

European shares closed down more than 2 percent, and losses for MSCI's widely tracked 47-country world index broke $4 trillion, with shares in emerging markets down sharply.

The blue chip Dow Jones Industrials index, which on Monday slumped briefly by more than 10 percent from its Jan. 26 record high, remains down about 8 percent from that point.

The swings on Wall Street indexes were wide, with an 89-point difference between the benchmark S&P 500 index's intraday high and low.

"We're bouncing around here. The market clearly hasn't decided what the sentiment for the day is," said Janna Sampson, co-chief investment officer at Oakbrook Investments LLC in Lisle, Illinois.

The S&P materials index, up 1.2 percent, led the advancers, while the utilities index, down 2.2 percent, led decliners.

The selloff in stocks that began last week has been built on concerns over higher interest rates and lofty valuations.

Some strategists view it as a healthy pullback after a rapid run-up in the start of the year and strong 2017 gains, and say the improving economic outlook is a positive for stocks overall.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 108.77 points, or 0.45 percent, to 24,454.52, the S&P 500 gained 4.27 points, or 0.16 percent, to 2,653.21 and the Nasdaq Composite added 42.59 points, or 0.61 percent, to 7,010.12.

The pan-European FTSEurofirst 300 index lost 2.50 percent and MSCI's gauge of stocks across the globe shed 1.22 percent.

Emerging market stocks lost 2.51 percent.

Earlier, Taiwan's main index lost 5.0 percent, its biggest slump since 2011, Hong Kong's Hang Seng Index dropped 5.1 percent and Japan's Nikkei dived 4.7 percent, its worst fall since November 2016, to four-month lows.

U.S. Treasury prices gained as volatile equity markets led investors to seek out lower-risk bonds, though many investors remained nervous after a week-long bond rout sent yields on Monday to four-year highs.

Benchmark 10-year notes last rose 7/32 in price to yield 2.7696 percent, from 2.794 percent late on Monday.

The original trigger for the equities sell-off was a sharp rise in U.S. bond yields late last week after data showed U.S. wages increasing at the fastest pace since 2009. That raised the alarm about higher inflation and, with it, potentially higher interest rates.

Commodities remained gloomy, with oil and industrial metals all falling as the year's stellar start for risk assets rapidly soured.

U.S. crude fell 0.39 percent to $63.90 per barrel and Brent was last at $67.14, down 0.71 percent.

Copper lost 1.35 percent to $7,072.50 a tonne.

The dollar rose to its highest in more than a week against a basket of currencies as traders piled back into the greenback amid the rout in stocks.

The dollar index last rose 0.05 percent, with the euro up 0.19 percent to $1.239.

(Additional reporting by Chuck Mikolajczak and Sinead Carew in New York, Marc Jones and Helen Reid in London and Hideyuki Sano in Tokyo; Editing by Catherine Evans and James Dalgleish)