Stocks end mixed in low-volume session

A LARGELY nondescript Tuesday ended with stocks mixed. An early bout of selling of the banks brought on by an overnight dip on Wall Street depressed the Straits Times Index to an intraday low of 3,278, though a positive session for the Dow futures was possibly the motivation for afternoon short-covering that lifted the index to 3,288.95 at the close, thus trimming its loss to just 2.61 points for the day.

News reports said that Monday's session in the US saw only 4.6 billion shares traded…