January 7th, 2000

[4:15 PM] Apple Stock Watch: Dow Soars to Record High, Apple Follows Upward Trend by Wes George On the last day of the MacWorld Expo Apple's stock staged a comeback after what proved to be a clutch popping week on Wall Street. Strong employment data released today by the U.S. Labor Department and Lucent's fall from grace couldn't faze investors. The Dow soared and the Nasdaq followed as technology stocks bounced out of their oversold position. Interestingly, the techs' second wind didn't rain on the NYSE's bull parade which continue its strong broadening rally. Apple bounced 4 dollars or 4.21% to end at 99 on a volume of 4 million shares. The Nasdaq stormed up 155 points (4.17%) to close at 3882 on 1.6 billion shares traded for its largest single session point gain ever. The Nasdaq is still down 5% for the week. The Dow climbed another 269 points (2.39%) to close at 11522, a new record high, on a volume of 1.2 billion shares traded. The S&P 500 gained 38.02 points (2.71%) to close at 1441.47. The bellwether 30-year U.S.Treasury bond gained 8/32 to close at 94 10/32. The yield declined to 6.53% from 6.57% on Thursday. A CNBC poll of ten economists reported that all ten believe that the Fed will raise interest rates a quarter point in February and 7 of the 10 economists believe the Fed will hike rates again in May. Next week will be a busy for the bond market with a slew of new economic data to ponder and a speech by Alan Greenspan on the topic of technology and the U.S. economy. In Apple related businesses, Adobe was up 3 dollars to close at 64 3/4, Symantec gained 3 13/16 to close at 51 7/8. Akamai gained 12 1/4 to 248 3/8, while ARM Holdings soared 31 1/2 dollars to close at 185. Macromedia lost 1 1/16 to end at 77 1/2. Apple's Power PC partners: Motorola gained 9 7/8 to close at 128 7/8, while IBM gave back 7/16 to close at 113 9/16. Apple's competitors: Dell lost 1 13/16 to end at 46 3/16. There is some concern that Dell may follow Gateway's lead by warning investors to expect lesser earnings this quarter. Hewlett Packard gained 3 9/16 dollars to close at 104 9/16. Microsoft gained 1 7/16 to close at 111 7/16. Intel surged ahead 3 1/4 to end at 82. Compaq gained a fraction to close at 28 1/4. Gateway gained 2 1/2 to close at 61 1/2 In other market news: The December jobless rate stayed the same as November at 4.1%, although it would have been low as 4.0% without the ameliorating effects of a new official government method of making seasonal adjustments. 315,000 new non-farm jobs were added to the U.S. economy, far surpassing the 230,000 range most economists forecast. Meanwhile, average hourly earnings increased $0.06 to $13.46, in line with expectations. According to the Wall Street Journal, "for all of 1999 the unemployment rate averaged 4.2%, the lowest since 3.5% in 1969 during the Vietnam War. In 1998 the unemployment rate averaged 4.5%." 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