US stocks are ending 2015 mostly flat, capping volatile year

The U.S. stock market took investors for a wild ride in 2015, but in the end it was a trip to nowhere.

Despite veering between record highs and the steepest dive in four years, the stock market is on track to end the year essentially flat.

Japan's market finished flat after that country's government stepped up its economic stimulus program.

In the U.S., the market got 2015 off to a slow start as investors worried about falling crude oil prices, flat earnings growth and when and how quickly the Federal Reserve would begin raising interest rates.

Worries about slowing growth in China and elsewhere gave reason for the Fed to pause and for investors to fret, even as the U.S. economy continued to create jobs and consumer confidence improved.

Weak company earnings, largely due to the strong dollar and falling oil prices, didn't do much for the market's confidence.

The Nasdaq composite returned to positive territory for the year, while the Dow average and S&P 500 remained slightly in the red until December.

[...] the Dow was on course to end 2015 with a loss of 1.5 percent, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq was pointing to a 6.5 percent gain for the year.

Traders had been predicting early on that the central bank would begin raising its benchmark interest rate as early as March.

Once investors determined that China's slowdown would not spillover to the U.S. and European economies, "then we had a very rapid recovery from that very sharp decline," Jeremy Zirin, chief equities strategist at UBS Wealth Management Americas.

"There's only been a handful of really strong performers on a market cap-weighted index that have driven us to performance while the majority of the indices and the majority of the stocks are actually negative for the year," said Darrell Cronk, president of Wells Fargo Investment Institute.