Stock Market Today: The Stock Market Crawls, But Stocks Run Wild

The new week started like last week ended: The major indices mostly treaded water ahead of a robust earnings slate and a host of economic data releases, but a closer look revealed a number of spectacular moves.

GameStop (GME, +18.1%), which we mentioned last week has been shooting higher courtesy of a "short squeeze," did it again Monday – for a while. GME shares soared by as much as 145% before coming back to earth (relatively speaking, anyway), with several trading halts triggered along the way.

It wasn't alone. Bed Bath & Beyond (BBBY, +1.6%) and Dillard's (DDS, +9.3%) were among other heavily bet-against stocks that saw extreme midday rallies simmer before the close.

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Those moves didn't do much to budge the major indices, however. The Dow Jones Industrial Average finished with a small 0.1% decline to 30,960, while the Nasdaq Composite (+0.7% to 13,635) and S&P 500 (+0.4% to 3,855) continued to discover new record territory.

Other action in the stock market today:

• The Russell 2000 declined by 0.3% to 2,163.
• Gold futures slipped by 0.1% to $1,855.20 per ounce.
• U.S. crude oil futures settled at $52.77 per barrel, a 1% improvement.
• Bitcoin prices, at $33,606 on Friday, slid marginally to $33,430. (Bitcoin trades 24 hours a day; prices reported here are as of 4 p.m. each trading day.)

What's Fueling This Particular Fire

Why are we seeing such massive speculative spikes right now? Several theories abound, but among them is the idea that there's a surplus of cash for investors to speculate with.

"There's a large and growing amount of money in savings that is sloshing around and creating unpredictable movements in asset markets globally," says Raymond James analyst Tavis McCourt, "and we suspect this may continue until economies re-open and this excess savings is diverted back into the real economy."

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