Paul Kangas' Stocks in the News
Tuesday, July 08, 2008
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PAUL KANGAS: A big drop in oil prices helped set the direction on Wall Street today, sending the Dow and the NASDAQ higher at the open. We'll have more about oil's decline in a moment. Stocks turned flat around midday as earnings jitters heated up and investors weighed a weak report on pending home sales. But buyers came back strongly as oil continued to fall. The financial and tech stocks led the way higher, with the market closing at its best levels of the day. Dow Industrial Average closed up 152.25 at 11,384.21. The NASDAQ composite jumped 51.12 ending at 2,294.44. Standard & Poor's 500 gained 21.39 to 1,273.70. In the bond market, the 10-year note climbed 6/32 to 99 29/32, putting the yield at 3.89 percent.
Big Board volume leader on 28 million shares, Citigroup (C), up $0.99, an indication of a little rally in the financial sector, as was Bank of America's gain of $2.01.
EMC (EMC) down $1.75. Major casualty. EMC owns 85 percent of VMWare (VMW), whose stock took a tumble today. Let's have a look at it. Down $13. The chairman of VM issued an earnings warning because of the weak economy, and the company's board fired CEO Diane Greene, because it wanted a CEO with more experience in running a large company. The board did name Paul Maritz as the new CEO. A major casualty in VMWare.
Back to the active list. General Electric (GE), up $0.96. Wachovia (WB) and that strong bank group up $1.65. Nice rebound there.
Pfizer (PFE) an $0.80 gainer, and Ford Motor (F) $0.43 advance.
Another strong bank stock, JPMorgan (JPM), up $1.73.
Washington Mutual (WM) moved up $0.86. And then came Wells-Fargo (WFC), with a decent gain of $1.15. Of course, these stocks have been hard hit recently.
The oil stocks notably weak today as you might imagine. Apache (APA), Cabot Oil (COG), Chevron (CVX), Exxon Mobil (XOM), Schlumberger (SLB), all down significantly, but they did recover quite a bit from their lows of the session.
Another weak group -- metals and mining stocks today. The materials down. Cleveland Cliffs (CLF), Freeport-McMoRan (FCX) in cooper and gold, and Nucor (NUE), the big steel. Steel Dynamics (STLD), U.S. Steel (X), all casualties today.
Office Depot (ODP) down $3.29. The company says second quarter same- store sales dropped almost 10 percent from last year, and gave, as you might expect, an earnings warning as a result.
Marsh & McLennan, the big insurance company, up $2.24. Citigroup upgraded it from hold to a buy.
And UPS had a decent day, up $2.5 a share. The Stiffel Nicholas brokerage upgraded it from hold to buy on a valuation basis.
AbitibiBowater (ABH) up $1.30. Credit Suisse upgraded the U.S. paper sector to overweight, and that helped that whole group.
Stage Stores (SSI) up nearly $2 a share. June same-store sales rose 1.2 percent. The company sees second quarter earnings at or above its previous $0.23 per share estimate.
And Goodrich Petroleum (GDP) down $5.78. The company began a public offering of 3 million of its common shares. A little earnings dilution there.
Orient Express Hotels (OEH) down $2.79. Standard & Poor's downgraded it from hold to sell. Merrill Lynch downgraded it from neutral to underperform.
Apple (AAPL) topped the Nasdaq actives, up $4.39, its iPhone introduction due this Friday.
Research in Motion (RIMM) up $6.38.
Google (GOOG) had a good day, up $10.62. Sasquehanna Securities put a $635 target on Google's stock in the belief second quarter earnings will top estimates. Results are due out July 17th.
Microsoft (MSFT) down $0.18.
And then Qualcomm (QCOM) with a gain of $2.19.
Baidu.com (BIDU) up $6.67.
Intel (INTC) rose $0.21, while Cisco (CSCO) rose $0.31. Oracle (ORCL) a $0.49 gain, and Yahoo! (YHOO) up $0.73 a share.
InterDigital (IDCC) plunging $5.72. The company had a setback in its patent infringement case with Samsung.
Those are the stocks in the news tonight.
