Paul Kangas' Stocks in the News
Tuesday, December 02, 2008
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PAUL KANGAS: Bargain hunters were out in full force on Wall Street this morning, after yesterday's huge sell-off. In a steady advance, the Dow posted a 265-point gain by mid-day, with the NASDAQ Composite up 53 points. Those dismal November auto sales prompted a deep afternoon fade in stocks, which had the Dow up just 38 points at 2:30 this afternoon. And incidentally, the NASDAQ suffered a data failure right around that time, which is why that chart shows a flat line through the close. General Electric shares led a late market rally though and that resulted in solid closing gains. The Dow Industrial Average ended up exactly 270 points at 8419.09. The NASDAQ up 51.73 at 1449.80, while the Standard & Poor's 500 Index gained 32.60 ending at 848.81. Over in the bond market, the 10-year note rose 10/32 to 109 7/32, putting the yield down to 2.69 percent.
Most active big board issue on nearly 34 million shares was General Electric (GE) moving up $2.11 or 13.6 percent. The company sees fourth quarter earnings down to $0.50 to $0.52 at the low end of its previous guidance of $0.50 up to $0.65. It does plan to reorganize GE Capital as we heard and it says it will maintain its $1.24 per share annual dividend in 2009.
Citigroup (C) in there with a $0.77 gain.
Another strong Bank of America (BAC) up $1.52.
Ford Motor Co (F) up $0.15. You just heard the news and the company said can break even by 2011.
JPMorgan Chase (JPM) up $2.41.
Wells Fargo & Co (WFC) up $2.48.
ExxonMobil (XOM) rose $3.30.
Pfizer (PFE) edging up $0.74.
And AT&T (T) with a $1.08 a share gain.
And Wachovia (WB), tenth in volume, was up $0.69.
Goldman Sachs (GS) down $0.76, traded as low as $60.23. Yesterday that stock was off $13 a share after Credit Suisse predicted a fourth quarter loss for Goldman around $4 a share. Today UBS predicted a loss of $5.50 a share. And just think, a month ago, Wall Street was looking for earnings of $2.34 a share.
Nexen (NXY) up $1.25. This is a Canadian oil and gas producer. The "Financial Times" website reported Total, the big French oil, was about to make a $38 a share Canadian bid for the company. It did trade as high as $23.40, but Nexen said it knew of no corporate developments to account for the action in its stock today.
St. Jude Medical (STJ) rising $2.39. The company sees fourth quarter earnings of $0.56 to $0.60 a share. Standard & Poor's sees the company's underlying fundamentals very strong and repeated a "buy" recommendation on St. Jude stock.
Medicis Pharmaceutical (MRX) rising $2.26. It's in a joint drug development pact with Impax Laboratories and the two companies have ended all legal disputes related to Solodyn tablets.
Williams-Sonoma (WSM), this is the home products retailer, got an upgrade from Merrill Lynch from "under perform" to "buy" and McCowan (ph) brokerage upgraded it from "under perform" to "neutral," up $1.44, nice move in the stock.
Wright Express (WXS) up $2.10 a share. This is a payment processing firm and the Janey Montgomery stock brokerage upgraded it from "neutral" to a "buy."
Apple (AAPL) topped the active list on NASDAQ, up $3.54.
With Google (GOOG) behind with a $9.12 gain.
Research in Motion (RIMM) losing $2.48. JPMorgan cut fourth quarter earnings on RIMM due to the global economic slowdown.
Microsoft (MSFT) edging up $0.54.
And Cisco Systems (CSCO), $0.36 rise there.
Intel (INTC) up $0.72.
Oracle (ORCL) gained $0.32.
Qualcomm (QCOM) $0.58 advance.
Amgen (AMGN) down $0.13.
And Yahoo! (YHOO) up $0.76, traded as high as $12.50. "Wall Street Journal" reports former AOL Chairman Jonathan Miller is trying to raise funds to buy all or part of Yahoo!
And then, Tessera Technologies (TSRA) plunged $7.67 after an international trade commission judge ruled Motorola, Qualcomm and several other chip makers did not infringe on Tessara's chip packaging patents.
