Paul Kangas' Stocks in the News
Monday, June 08, 2009
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PAUL KANGAS: Wall Street traders today decided it was time to take some profits from the recent rally. The Dow fell over a hundred points in the first half hour of the trading session with the NASDAQ down as well. But light volume on the sell-off convinced a lot of investors this was a healthy correction and they started to buy this afternoon and stocks went on to close narrowly mixed. The Dow closed with a gain of 1.36 at 8764.49. The NASDAQ Composite fell 7.02, a modest lost at 1842.40. Standard & Poor's 500 down just a fraction, .95. Over in the bond market, the 10-year note fell 9/32 to 93 28/32, lifting the yield to 3.88 percent.
New York exchange volume leader on nearly 49 million shares, Citigroup (C) losing $0.04. Followed by Bank of America (BAC) a $0.20 rise there.
Ford Motor Co (F) edged up $0.02.
And so did General Electric (GE).
Pfizer (PFE) $0.20 loss there.
JPMorgan Chase (JPM) rose $0.84.
Sprint Nextel (S) $0.15 loss.
Wells Fargo (WFC) $0.67 gain.
SLM Corp (SLM), the Student Loan Marketing Corp., that's what it used to be called, up $1.32, good percentage gain. The William Blair investment house said despite potential elimination of the Federal family education loan program, the government still needs SLM for student lending because the U.S. doesn't have the necessary infrastructure in place to do that student lending and SLM does.
Altria Group (MO), tenth in volume, $0.18 gain there.
McDonald's (MCD) down $1.15. May local sales up 5.1 percent from a year ago. U.S. sales up only 2.8 percent. In April, both of those figures were well above 6 percent but the strong dollar in May hurt those sales especially overseas.
Texas instruments (TXN) closed with a $0.09 gain and jumped $1 in after hours trading when the company boosted its second quarter earnings guidance from a high of $0.15 to $0.22 a share at best.
General Mills (GIS) up $2.06. The company says fiscal 2009 earnings estimates will exceed recent guidance of $3.87 to $3.89 by at least several cents a share.
Blackrock (BLK) up $5.62. The company confirms it's been in talks with Barclay's bank about Blackrock's potential purchase of Barclay's global investors unit and that includes the Ishare business. Meanwhile, "Financial Times" said the deal is close between these two. The price will be around $12 to $13 billion.
Continental Airlines (CAL) a $0.94 loss. The International Air Transport Association, IATA as it's called, forecasts the airline industry could lose up to $9 billion this year. That's nearly double its March forecast for a loss of $4.79 billion.
Scotts Miracle-Gro (SMG) $1.22 gain there. BMO Capital upgraded it from "market perform" to "out perform" on the company's improving fundamentals.
Apple (AAPL) topped the active list on NASDAQ, losing $0.82. You heard the story there.
Google (GOOG) $5.55 loss.
Microsoft (MSFT) $0.09 drop there.
Research in Motion (RIMM) $0.75 loss.
No change in Cisco Systems (CSCO). This was its first day of trading as a Dow Industrial Average stock.
Moving along, Oracle (ORCL) $0.16 gain.
No change in Intel (INTC).
Baidu (BIDU) down $0.17.
$0.03 drop in Qualcomm (QCOM).
And First Solar (FSLR) up $1.87.
Elsewhere, Verisign (VRSN) tumbling $3.29 on news negative reaction to the reversal of the lower court dismissal of an antitrust suit against the company.
And those are the stocks in the news tonight.
