[4:40 PM] Apple Stock Watch: Cinema Display Lights Up Apple's Stock
by Wes George
The year end rally broadened on Wall Street pushing the Nasdaq to a plus 4000 close for the first time. Friday the stock markets will close at 1:00 p.m. (EST) for New Year's Eve.
Apple regained its momentum after sagging more than 2 points by mid-day to close up 2 1/2 points, or 2.55%, to close at 100 11/16 with 2.5 million shares traded.
A minor hole was discovered in Apple's Mac OS 9 Internet Protocol software which may have caused some of AAPL's weakness early in day. Apple has already posted a fix for the problem on their software update page.
Apple's announcement that they are now shipping the 22 inch Apple Cinema Display this afternoon may account for AAPL's rapid recovery late in the trading session.
All three major indices scored record highs today, joined by the Russell 2000 with its first new high of the year, up 26% in 1999.
The Dow gained 7 points to close at a new record high of 11484, with 573 million shares trading hands. Basic materials and chemicals continued to do well early in the session, but they gave back much of their gains in the last hour. Online brokers were up about 13%. The advance-decline line was 2 for 1 positive.
The Nasdaq busted through the 4000 level, up 68.43 points to close at 4040.54 on 1.15 billion shares making this year's 83.5% run up the best single year any U.S. index has ever had. Internet, biotechs, telecoms and finance stocks were up.
The Nasdaq is now 4 standard deviations above its 200 day moving average.This the first in history an index has achieved such a large gap. For example, the bottom of last year's Nasdaq correction on October 2, 1998 was a mere negative one standard deviation from the 200 day moving average.
It's worth noting that 50% of the stocks listed on the Nasdaq are down for the year, 2.0% are unchanged while 48% are up. The Nasdaq is up so much because it is a market capitalization weighted index.
The S&P 500 advanced 5.67 points to close up at 1463.33, another record high.
The bellwether 30-year U.S.Treasury bond gained 5/16 to close at 95 25/32 while the yield slipped to 6.44% from 6.48% on Tuesday.
The index of leading indicators, a key gauge of future economic strength, was up in November by 0.3 to 108.3, the highest reading in 40 years. Economists say this means the U.S. economic expansion will continue into next year.
In Apple related businesses, Adobe closed down a fraction to 65 15/16, Macromedia was down 1 17/32 to 75 3/16, while Symantec gained 3 1/2 to close at 60 3/4. Akamai was up 32 1/16 to close at 303 9/16 while ARM Holdings gave back 2 point to close at 199 1/2.
Apple's Power PC partners: Motorola advanced 2 15/16 to close at 145 5/8, while IBM lost 3/4 to close at 109 1/16.
Apple's competitors: Dell was up a fraction to end at 51 13/16. Gateway lost 3/16 to close at 69 3/4. Hewlett Packard climbed 2 5/16 points to close at 113 5/8. Compaq was down a fraction at 26 7/8. Microsoft rose 7/16 to close at 117 15/16. Intel gained 7/8 to end at 83 7/8.
Qualcomm (QCOM) was up 156 points to close at 659 after Paine Webber put a price target of $1,000 a share for the company which controls the patents on CDMA or code-division multiple access. Royalties from CDMA licensees may become a $20 billion dollar revenue stream for Qualcomm by 2010.
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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