[5:30 PM] Apple Stock Watch: Market Slows Down For Year End, Apple Dips With Weak Volume
by Wes George
The stock market shows signs of winding down for the year as fund managers put the final touches on their portfolios leaving the market largely in the hands of individual investors as we tip toe towards Y2K with just a bit of nervousness in the tech stocks.
Apple gave back 1 1/8 (1.13%) to close down at 98 3/16 on weak volume of 2.2 million shares.
Web retailer Outpost.com said that some of the hotter items it sold this Christmas were iMacs and iBooks in a Yahoo business news report.
The Dow rose 85 points to close at a new record high of 11476, on lightest volume since September 20th, with 661 million shares trading hands. The cyclical stocks were up today. Paper, aluminum, packaging, chemical and heavy machinery stocks all out performed the techs as a group. the advance-decline line was barely positive.
The Nasdaq lost 3.29 points to close at 3972 on 1.2 billion shares. The Nasdaq traded well above 4,000 for most of the day, but sagged into negative territory in the last half hour. Business to business e-commerce stocks did well along with the biotech sector.
The S&P 500 squeezed out 0.57 points to close up at 1457.67.
The bellwether 30-year U.S.Treasury bond traded lower by 7/32 to close at 95 7/32, while the yield rose to 6.48% from 6.45% on Monday.
Consumer confidence in the economy rose during December to near the record high set in 1968 just after the index was created. Consumer confidence is an important indicator of how much money Americans are likely to spend in the quarter. Consumer spending accounts for approximately 65% of the nation's overall economic activity.
According to the Wall Street Journal, "the latest confidence reading provides further evidence that the economic expansion that began in March 1991 should continue through February to become the longest in U.S. history, surpassing the 106-month expansion of the 1960s."
Sales of existing homes in the U.S.was up in November after declining for several months. However, existing home sales are still below the recent 6 month trend of 5.2 million unit annual sales rate.
In Apple related businesses, Adobe gained 1 3/8 to close at 66 1/8, Macromedia was down 2 3/32 to 76 23/32, while Symantec lost 4 to close at 57 1/4. Akamai gave back 14 3/8 to close at 271 1/2 while ARM Holdings continued to soar, up 11 7/8 to close at 201 1/2.
Apple's Power PC partners: Motorola advanced 1 5/16 to close at 142 11/16, while IBM lost a half point to close at 109 1/4.
Apple's competitors: Dell lost 3/4 to end at 51 9/16. Gateway lost a fraction to close at 69 15/16. Hewlett Packard climbed 2 13/16 points to close at 111 5/16. Compaq was down 1 5/16 at 27 7/16.
Microsoft gave back 1 5/8 to close at 117 1/2. Intel lost 2 1/16 to end at 83.
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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