It has come down to this: a year in which the US stock market (led by a handful of shares even as the vast majority of stocks has dropped) has gone nowhere, but took the longest and most volatile path to get there, is about to close either red or green for 2015 based on what happens in today's low-volume session following yesterday's unexpected last half hour of trading "air pocket" which brought the S&P back to unchanged for the year.

With oil below $37 and with many markets around the globe closing early (shortened trading hours in U.K., France, Spain, Netherlands, Portugal, Belgium; markets closed in Italy, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Switzerland, Austria, Germany) the US may well be alone: European equities pared an annual gain and stocks fell as much as 0.2 percent, heading for the worst December since 2002. Even as the Stoxx 600 headed for a third weekly advance, it has fallen 4.9 percent in December, reducing its gain this year to 7.2 percent.

U.S. index futures are little changed, with the difference between a red and green close determined by just 5 S&P points; equities in China dropped for the first time in three days. Brent climbed as much as 0.9 percent, still headed for the biggest two-year drop since at least 1988. The South African rand, Canadian dollar and Norwegian krone were among the biggest currency losers. Ramiro Loureiro, an analyst at Banco Comercial Portugues SA's Millennium unit in Lisbon told Bloomberg that "It has not been a good end to 2015, with low liquidity making market weakness even more pronounced. Even though we had all types of risks and concerns thrown at markets, such as the collapse in oil prices and key central bank decisions, Europe still managed to end the year higher."

This is where we stand as of this moment:

S&P 500 futures up less than 0.1% to 2056

Stoxx 600 down 0.2% to 367

FTSE 100 down 0.2% to 6260

DAX closed

German 10Yr yield unchanged at 0.63%

Italian 10Yr yield down 4bps to 1.6%

Spanish 10Yr yield down 4bps to 1.77%

MSCI Asia Pacific up 0.1% to 132

Nikkei 225 closed

Hang Seng up 0.1% to 21914

Shanghai Composite down 0.9% to 3539

S&P/ASX 200 down 0.5% to 5296

US 10-yr yield up less than 1bp to 2.3%

Dollar Index up 0.13% to 98.39

WTI Crude futures up 0.2% to $36.69

Brent Futures up 0.5% to $36.63

Gold spot up less than 0.1% to $1,062

Silver spot down less than 0.1% to $13.89

And this is where the year is ending for some key markets: for the S&P the year was a wash, but for EMs it was a bloodbath leading to an ugly year for the MSCI World index.