[4:00 PM] Apple Stock Watch: Apple Slides 4.45%
by Wes George
Motorola beat earnings this quarter but then lowered its forecast for next quarter below Wall Street's expectation and that's all it took to tip the high tech stocks into a tail spin. The Nasdaq blindly groped for a bottom all day, but we won't know if it found one till tomorrow. Meanwhile, the Dow steadily worked its way higher.
Apple slid lower with the rest of 'em, down 5 9/16 or 4.45%, to close at 119 7/16 on high volume of 4.8 million shares.
The Nasdaq gave back 132 points (-3.16%), to close at 4055 on 1.67 billion shares traded. The Nasdaq is down 8% in the last two days and is down about 19% from the high set back on March 10 at 5048, putting us a few points below where the composite began the year.
The Dow gained 100 points (0.90%) to close at 11287 on volume of 973 million shares. Chemical, autos, papers, oils, insurance, drugs, airlines, consumer staples and retail stocks all saw gains. Non-techie stocks are now out performing the techs sectors in 2000. Today's close was the best showing for the Dow since January 20th.
The S&P 500 lost 3.83 points (-0.25%) to close at 1500.63.
In Apple related businesses: Akamai lost 25 9/16 to close at 107 3/4. ARM Holdings lost 15 dollars to close at 160. Adobe rose 2 5/16 to close at 119 1/2. Earthlink lost 7/8 to close at 15 1/8. Macromedia lost 8 3/8 to 66 19/32 . IBM shed 3 dollars to 119 1/8.
Motorola announced earnings a penny ahead of the First Call/Thomson Financial consensus at $0.56 per share but the company had lower margins on wireless phones. Motorola saw a 41% drop in cell phone profits in the first quarter and said a component shortage is hurting their margins. The stock received two downgrades, two reiterations of "buy" rating and one upgrade to "strong buy". Go figure. Motorola's stock got punished, down 26 3/4 to close at 123 7/16.
Apple's competitors: Hewlett Packard lost 1 7/16 to close at 145 13/16. Intel lost 3/8 to close at 130 3/4. Gateway gained 7/8 to close at 57 5/8. Compaq slipped 1 7/16 to close at 27 15/16. Shares of Microsoft lost 2 3/16 to 83 7/8.
In Economic News: Stayed tuned for March's Producer Prices and Retail Sales numbers on Thursday. Then on Friday the all important Consumer Price Index and Industrial Production Numbers for March are announced. Some Investors may sit on the sideline this week to see what this new data has to say about the direction of inflation in the hot US economy.
The bellwether 30-year US Treasury bond lost 106 26/32 to 106 26/32 as bond traders swapped out of the high priced treasuries and bought into the beaten down agency funds such as Fannie Mae. The yield, which moves inversely to the price, rose to 5.77%.
The Mac Observer Virtual Sock Watch Portfolio lost US$1875.50 as all three of our holdings (IBM, Lucent, and Apple) closed lower.
For full quotes on all the companies mentioned in this article, we have assembled this set of quotes at Yahoo! for your reference. We also have many of these same quotes reported live (20 minute delay) on our home page. For other stories regarding Apple's stock activity, visit our Apple Stock Watch Special Report, as well as The Mac Observer Virtual Stock Watch portfolio.
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