NEW YORK - Wall Street seesawed Friday, appropriate for the final day of a turbulent first quarter that saw stocks take a roller-coaster ride.

The Dow Jones industrials finished the day 5 points higher and ended the quarter down about 108 points, or 0.87 percent, the blue chip index's most feeble performance - and its first quarterly loss - since the second quarter of 2005.

Still, the Dow is more than 300 points above its levels in early March.

Concern that the economy is weakening too quickly has been a big factor in the market's volatility this quarter. The major stock indexes started out strong in January, with the Dow extending its record-setting trek that began in 2006. It hit its peak of 12,786.62 on Feb. 20.

But stocks then stumbled, and the Dow plummeted 416 points on Feb. 27 as various worries - about the possibility of recession, tumbling stocks in China, the floundering subprime mortgage market and the dollar weakening against the yen - came to a head.

The Dow hit its lowest close of the quarter on March 5, at 12,050.41, and briefly dipped below the psychological 12,000 mark on March 14. But investors managed to keep the market from spinning out and steered the Dow back near January levels, thanks to reassuring economic data and calming words from the Fed. The major indexes finished the quarter little changed, with the S&P 500 and Nasdaq each up 0.1 percent.

On Friday, investors - buying stocks to shore up their portfolios as the quarter ended - managed to pull stocks up from their lows of the day. The session saw the markets rise, plunge, and then recover - a pattern similar to their performance over the first quarter.

"It's been kind of a rough quarter. There have been some shocks out there. And the retail investor has been taking it in stride," said Scott Merritt, U.S. equity strategist at JPMorgan Asset Management.

Among the problems for stocks this year has been the run-up in crude oil prices. The price pulled back slightly Friday (dropping 16 cents to $65.87 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange) after exceeding a six-month high this week, a rise that has heightened worries about high fuel costs eating into discretionary spending.

Energy prices aren't the only problem: The inflation barometer that excludes energy and food shot up by 0.3 percent in February, the Commerce Department said, leaving core inflation rising by 2.4 percent over the past 12 months.

"It's stubbornly above the Fed's comfort zone," said Merritt, noting that investors have been hoping that the Federal Reserve will lower interest rates later this year. "They're afraid that they're going to take their sweet time making rate cuts."

"The Fed is more likely to reduce rates if you get bad news, and today's (economic) data is probably more in line with a stay-the-course strategy," said Eric Green, who helps manage about $4.5 billion at Penn Capital Management in Cherry Hill, N.J. "We need to see some really good inflation data before they're willing to cut rates."

Another factor in the first- quarter doldrums: A University of Michigan survey showed consumer confidence slipped in March from a month earlier, causing wariness among investors. But analysts pointed out that a drop in sentiment doesn't necessarily mean a drop in spending; the Commerce Department reported Friday that personal spending rose in February by the largest amount in 11 months, a good sign that the economy will keep chugging along, especially since recent data have shown stability in the job market.

"Inflation is a worry, so the market is reacting in a tepid way to what I considered fairly good economic news," said -Richard Hoyt, market strategist for KDV Wealth Management in Minneapolis.

After the 416-point drop on Feb. 27, some analysts wondered whether the market simply was undergoing a correction. But Merritt noted that for a stock dive to be officially considered a correction, it should exceed 10 percent - which the recent decline did not.

But volatility remains higher than it was before the big dive, and investors will be looking to next month's first-quarter earnings reports to see whether the economy is retreating slowly, as expected, or dropping off precipitously.