Wall Street Turns Positive - NYTimes.com Stocks on Wall Street rose Wednesday on reassuring jobs data, a day after the Dow Jones industrial average took a 203-point dive, its worst drop this year. The Dow closed up almost 80 points, or 0.6 percent. The Standard & Poor's 500-stock index added 0.7 percent, and the Nasdaq composite index gained 0.9 percent. The private sector added 216,000 jobs last month, the ADP National Employment Report showed Wednesday, exceeding economists" expectations for a gain of 208,000. It was too soon to say whether Tuesday's decline signaled the end of a strong rally in stocks that began in October, but the rally has survived six other 200-point drops in the Dow since then. The Dow is still up almost 20 percent since its close on Oct. 3, 2011, and about 5 percent this year, even after Tuesday's sell-off that was driven by concerns about Europe and slower economic growth in China. "We had one pullback," said Frank Fantozzi, chief executive of Planned Financial Services, a Cleveland wealth management firm. I think it's not indicative of anything, that all of a sudden we're going to jump off a cliff, or that the market is going to go in a different direction. The S.&P. 500, a broader measure of the market than the Dow, is ahead more than 7 percent for the year. Even before Tuesday, sentiment was growing that stock buyers might have gotten ahead of themselves. The thinking was that stock prices were already assuming a recovery in the American economy, while the risk of a European recession and a default in Greece were downplayed. The sell-off, which spread west from Europe, also interrupted a period of unusual calm on Wall Street. Before Tuesday, the Dow had not fallen 100 points for 45 consecutive trading sessions, the longest streak since 2006. "When things go straight up and don't ever correct or have some sort of normal pullback, as an investor, that makes me nervous," said Ed Hyland, a global investment specialist with J.P. Morgan Private Bank. Last year, sell-offs like this were much more common. The S.&P. fell by at least 1 percent on 48 trading days, roughly one day in every five. During the depths of the financial crisis in the last four months of 2008, it happened roughly once every three days. European stocks posted a modest rebound Wednesday after dropping more than 3 percent Tuesday in Germany, Spain and France and 1.9 percent in Britain. The French CAC 40 closed up 0.9 percent, while the DAX in Germany rose 0.6 percent. The FTSE index of leading British stocks added 0.4 percent. Cautious trading in Europe reflected continued concerns over Greece. Thursday marks the last day the country's private creditors can sign up to a deal meant to slash $139 billion off the government's books and put it on the path to recovery. Asian markets were lower Wednesday as they weighed these fears. The Nikkei 225 index in Tokyo fell 0.6 percent, while Hong Kong's Hang Seng slid 0.9 percent. South Korea's Kospi lost 0.9 percent. Benchmark indexes in Australia, Taiwan, Singapore and Indonesia also fell. In mainland China, the benchmark Shanghai composite index lost 0.7 percent. The price of oil rose $1.27 to $105.97 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange as speculators bet that a slowly improving American economy would eventually boost demand. New York crude has risen from $96 last month amid fears of a disruption in global oil supplies driven by the potential for military conflict with Iran.