[4:00 PM] Apple Stock Watch: Turn Around Day In The Markets, Apple Surges Ahead
by Wes George
Things looked pretty grim for tech stocks this morning. Profit taking drove the Nasdaq down more than a hundred points, while bargain hunting pushed the Dow back above 10,000. Apple briefly touched 108 1/2 dollars a share then headed north without looking back.
Apple gained 2 7/8 or 2.60% to close at 113 1/4 on 2.83 million shares traded.
Fletcher and Faraday, a Broker Dealer on Wall Street, reiterated their buy rating on Apple saying, "We believe Apple's core fundamentals are solid, given a good product pipeline and strong financials. We think that the new products introduced by the company in 1999 have been well received and that the company will be smart about introducing new products over the course of the year. In addition the company announced that it plans to buy back $500 million in stock."
The Nasdaq lost 12 points (0.28%) to close at 4577 with a volume of 1.8 billion shares traded. The Nasdaq fell 128 points before bouncing back to settle 38 points below the record high.
The Dow soared 176 points (1.79%), to close at 10038 on volume of over a billion shares. The value laden blue chips attracted the lion's share of fund flows today.
The S&P 500 gained 14.69 (1.10%) to close at 1348.05.
In Apple related businesses: Adobe lost 11/16 to close at 97 13/16. Akamai lost 10 15/16 to close at 256 1/8. ARM Holdings gained 3 5/8 to close at 235 7/8. IBM slipped 3 3/4 to close at 104 1/4 dollars. Shares of Earthlink gained 1 1/16 to close at 25 1/8. Macromedia gained 21/32 to 86 17/31. Motorola gained 3/16 to close at 159 7/16.
Apple's competitors: Intel lost 7/8 to close at 112 3/8. Dell gave back 1/4 to close at 41, after announcing a new high-end workstation that uses Intel's new Xeon processor. Hewlett Packard climbed 4 1/8 to close at 128 3/4. Shares of Microsoft gained 1/4 to close at 91 5/8 dollars. Gateway gave back a fraction to end at 69 5/16.
Compaq ended its long search for a new CFO by naming Jesse J. Greene, Jr., head of Kodak's business strategy and information technology, to that position. Compaq slipped 9/16 to close at 25 7/16.
In other news: Personal income in January grew 0.7% outpacing the 0.5% increase in consumer spending.
This is a big week for economic data. Tomorrow the consumer confidence report for February is released. Wednesday watch for the National Association of Purchasing Manager's Index and construction spending data. On Thursday the new jobless claims, new home sales and the leading indicators are released. Friday has the most important data release this week, with the employment data for February on the menu.
The bellwether 30-year US Treasury bond traded down 2/32 to 101 15/32. The yield, which moves inversely to the price, rose to 6.14% from last week's 6.13%.
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.
Apple
|
