November 17th 1999

[5:00 PM] The Apple Stock Watch: Rest and Test Day on Wall Street, Apple Closed Down
by Wes George

The stock markets turned negative after recently bounding to new highs on the Nasdaq and S&P 500. Wall Street is relieved to see the market take a break and regroup after reaching a strongly overbought condition yesterday. Most analysts see further advances coming soon. The only dark cloud on the horizon is the price of crude oil which hit a 9-year high today clobbering the transports and instigating higher bond yields. Higher yields draws money off the stock market and into bonds.

The Dow lost 49 points (0.45%) to close at 10883. Volume was strong with 950 millions shares traded. The financials were weak, while the oil stocks boomed.

The Nasdaq pulled back 26 points (0.79%) to end the session at 3269. Today was the heaviest volume day in stock market history on the Nasdaq with 1.6 billion shares traded.

The S&P 500 lost 9.14 (0.64%) to close at 1410.69.

The 30 year bond was down 29/32 to close at 99 31/32, the yield rose to 6.12%.

The Commerce Department said the Consumer Price Index rose 0.2% in October and the core CPI rate rose 0.2%. Both numbers met the expectations of economists. Housing starts were up only slightly at 0.1%, but applications for building permits showed signs of renewed strength in the spring, jumping 5.2% last month.

Apple was up most of the day, but ended down 15/16 to close at 90 1/4 with a continuation of the less than average volume trend we have seen the last few days.

Hewlett Packard (HWP) announced 4th quarter earnings after the bell that were in line with analysts' expectations of $0.73 per share. HWP rose 1 5/16 to close at 77 7/16. Applied Materials (AMAT) also beat earnings this afternoon with actual earnings of $0.75 per share, $0.02 better than expected.

It was a good day for Apple related stocks, Akamai, Arm Holdings, Macromedia and Symantec ended higher, while Adobe showed signs of profit taking, down 1 9/16 to 75. Apple's Power PC partners, IBM and Motorola went different directions. IBM closed down 1 5/8 to 93, while Motorola rose 1 3/16 to 119, on the news that demand for it cell phone components is too strong to meet.

Compaq rose 1 5/8 to end at 23 3/8, after announcing a high performance supercomputer that boasts multi- TeraFLOP power.

Oracle leapt 6 3/4 to close at 71 1/4. Yesterday Oracle's CFO Jeff Henley predicted that 2nd quarter revenue could be strongly higher because of renewed e-business software purchases after Y2K.

Dell, Microsoft, Intel, and Gateway all closed lower.

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.

The Mac Observer Spin: Go figure, the Fed raises rates and stocks close at all time highs. Analysts have speculated that many traders were just relieved that the rate hike was no longer an unknown issue.

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