A bleak outlook from Ben Bernanke, persistent credit worries, and Cisco-led sell-off in technology  combined to send stocks reeling before they recovered in the last hour of trading.

The Standard & Poor's 500 index rebounded to end down less than a point, after being off by more than 1 percent. The Dow closed down 33 points. But the technology-heavy Nasdaq composite index ended down nearly 2 percent.

After the market close on Wednesday, Cisco Systems forecast that revenue would grow 16 percent in the current quarter, below some forecasts. The company also pointed to weakening demand from financial companies.

Shares of Cisco were down nearly 9 percent. The selling in technology was broad: I.B.M. was down more than 4 percent; Microsoft ended down 2 percent. Even Wall Street darling Google was down 5 percent.

Investors continue to worry about bad debt dragging down financial companies.  After the market close on Wednesday, American International Group reported a  $2.68 billion after-tax write-down on investments tied to subprime mortgages, while Morgan Stanley took a $3.7 billion charge, or $2.5 billion after taxes.

"You've still got the financials sector that's sort of a black hole and on balance a subdued earnings environment with subdued outlooks,'' Dean Gulis at Loomis Sayles & Co. in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, told Bloomberg News. "At the same time you've got the consumer area where there's some softening in demand. That combination is hard to make any headway against.''

Stocks were little changed in the morning, with buying buoyed by a huge mining merger proposal from BHP Billiton and a sunnier outlook from Ford Motor.

Here is what the S&P 500 looked like today: