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Wall St. sharply pares initial steep losses


    NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks sharply pared huge early losses on Friday, as traders took a steep plummet at the open as suggesting that the selling was overdone.

    Initially, the Dow had sunk as low as 8 percent and the S&P 500 had fallen more than 7 percent in the first few minutes of trading, before cutting the bulk of those losses.

    The Dow Jones industrial average was down 252.33 points, or 2.94 percent, at 8,326.86. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index was down 28.27 points, or 3.11 percent, at 881.65. The Nasdaq Composite Index was down 25.29 points, or 1.54 percent, at 1,619.83.

    "We are extremely oversold right now. Everybody was looking for a hard, hard sell-off at the open and we got it. So this is a classic come-back from a sell-off at the open," said Angel Mata, managing director of listed equity trading at Stifel Nicolaus Capital Markets in Baltimore.

    "This is a psychological oversold bounce. Technicals have nothing to do with this."

    (Reporting by Ellis Mnyandu and Kristina Cooke; Editing by James Dalgleish)