[4:20 PM] Apple Stock Watch: Nasdaq is Up, Apple Closes Down...Again
by Wes George
An earnings warning from Xerox (XRX) set the market off to a weak opening but things quickly turned around as investors continued to shift their portfolio to towards the big cap technology stocks.
Apple continued to sell-off for a forth day, down 4 dollars to close at 99 on below average volume.
The Dow lost 32 points (0.29%) to close at 11192. Volume was heavy at 976 million share traded ahead of triple witching Friday. The Dow is now up 22% for year and 306% for the decade.
The Nasdaq rallied 38 points (1.06%) to close at 3658 with 1.57 billion shares traded. Biotechs and telecommunication stocks led the usual suspects higher today. The Nasdaq is up 66% for the year and a whopping 693% for the decade.
The S&P 500 lost 1.82 points (0.13%) to close at 1415.22. The S&P 500 is the laggard, up only 15% for the year so far.
The Russell 2000 made a new 52 week high today
The bellwether 30-year Treasury bond lost 17/32 to close at 98 28/32, while the yield rose to 6.20% from 6.16% on Friday.
Tomorrow morning the Labor Department will release the November Consumer Price Index (CPI) numbers, which are expected to increase 0.2%, that's the same amount the CPI increased in October. Oil and tobacco cost increases make up much of the rise. Economists consider this level of inflation as rather mild and don't expect the Fed to react strongly either way to the data.
Meanwhile, same-store retail sales figures for this Christmas are expected to be 5.0% better than last year according to Barnard's Retail Trend Report. Retail stocks like Home Depot (HD) and Walmart (WMT) were up sharply today.
In Apple related businesses Adobe gave back 2 7/16 to end at 60 3/16. Macromedia lost 2 13/16 to close at 84 1/16, while Symantec was flat at 58 5/16. Akamai was off 15 to close at 228 1/2.
Apple's Power PC partners, IBM and Motorola, went separate directions. IBM was up 1 1/2 to close at 110 1/2. Motorola saw some profit taking, down 2 11/16 to close at 128 3/16.
Apple's competitors ended the day mixed, Gateway was up 1 7/8 to close at 70 1/2 after Barron's magazine said Gateway's problems are only temporary. Hewlett Packard lost 3 1/8 to close at 105 7/8. Microsoft was up 2 3/4 to close at 96 5/8.
Compaq announced today that they have struck a deal with Samsung to develop Compaq's Alpha microprocessor for a variety of applications. Compaq traded flat at 25 1/16.
Intel was slapped with a downgrade by Prudential from a strong buy to an accumulate. However, it didn't sting much since Intel was one of the handful of stocks that the Nasdaq announced today will be co-listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in an important step towards the globalization of financial markets. Intel was up 1 13/16 to close at 74 1/16.
Oracle announces 2nd quarter earnings tomorrow, analysts expect earnings of $0.22 per share on sales totaling 2.4 billion. This recent quarter was forecast to be a tough one for Oracle due to the Y2K lock down on enterprise software purchases by big corporations. Oracle was slid 4 13/16 to close at 79 13/16.
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.
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