December 15th 1999
Titanic volume and a barf bag level of turbulence marred the stock market's rally today. The Nasdaq ranged from -down 68 points in the morning to close at the day's high of up 50 in a narrow buying spree powered by Microsoft and Intel. The Wall Street rumor of the day was that the rest of the year may suffer a lack of liquidity due to big funds moving to the sidelines to ride out Y2K. Apple's stock price traded in a volatile range from 91 1/16 to 97 1/4 and finally came to rest at 97 up 2 1/8 or 2.24% on average volume. From a technical analyst's point of view, Apple bounced off support today at 91 and made a rough equivalent to a Japanese candlestick charting formation known as a "hammer", which is indicative of a short term bottom. Interestingly, at 2:00 pm (EST) when Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's president, appeared on CNBC to announce Win2000's code was finished and ready for production, Apple's stock sold off by 3 dollars within minutes only to bounce back to close near the day's high. The Dow climbed 65 points (0.58%) to close at 11225. Today was the third time in history that the Dow had back to back billion share days. Tomorrow may be another billion share day ahead of Friday's expiration of futures contracts and options, if so, it will be the first time the Dow has ever seen 3 consecutive billions share volume days. Cyclical and commodity stocks such as paper and oil ended higher with two to three times normal volume. The Nasdaq gained 50.29 points (1.41%) to close at 3621.95 on 1.6 billion shares traded. The "Wintel" rally today was all about the concentration of capital into a handful of big cap technology hardware stocks, the advance- decline line continued its negative trend. Internet stocks were beaten down by interest rate fears. The S&P 500 advanced 10.15 points (0.72%) to close at 1413.32. The bellwether 30-year Treasury bond was down 10/32 to close at 97 7/32, while the yield hit a two week high rising to 6.33% from 6.30% on Tuesday. October US Business inventory grew for the 9th straight month, rising by 0.2%. Economists had expected a gain of 0.4% after a strong showing in September and because they were expecting inventory hoarding for the Y2K date change over. Inventories grew the strongest at wholesalers and factories, up 0.3%, but were flat for retailer businesses. In a separate report from the Federal Reserve, industrial production––a measure of the output of factories, mines and utilities––increased by 0.3% in November after growing at 0.8% (revised up from 0.6%) in October. Industrial production has climbed 4.3% year over year. This productivity increase helped hold industrial capacity utilization to 81.0%, up from 80.7% in October. Inflation isn't expected to be significant as long as factory capacity has room to expand without forcing manufacturers to build new infrastructure, the cost of which gets passed on to consumers in the form of price inflation. In Apple related businesses, Adobe gained 1 1/4 to end at 61 7/8. Macromedia lost 3 to close at 78 7/8, while Symantec bounced back by 3 3/4 to end at 57 3/4. Akamai was up 13 3/8 to close at 230 3/8. Apple's Power PC partners, IBM and Motorola went their separate ways. IBM lost 2 5/8 to close at 106 5/8. Motorola soared 10 13/16 to close at 130 3/16 on a strong buy recommendation. Oracle was a big gainer, up 13 7/16 to close at 90 3/8 after they beat analyst's earnings expectations of $0.22 per share by $0.04 yesterday. Today Oracle received a couple of upgrades from buy to strong buy, further boosting the stock. Apple's competitors benefited from the Win 2000 news, Dell jumped 2 1/8 to close at 43 3/16. Gateway was up 7/16 to close at 70 11/16 and Intel climbed 6 1/2 to 78 15/16. But, Hewlett Packard saw some profit taking down 2 1/4 to close at 101 1/8 and Compaq was off by 3/4 to 25 3/4. Microsoft ended the day up 9 3/4 to close at a new 52 week high of 108 7/16 after they said that Windows 2000 was released for manufacturing, indicating that it could be for sale by February 17th. In one day of trading Microsoft's stock gained $60 billion to push their market capitalization above half a trillion dollars and Bill Gate's mega fortune soared $12 billion to above $100 billion! 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.
[4:40 PM] Apple Stock Watch: Apple Bottoms Out
by Wes George