Dow Edges Closer to 13,000 Mark

Traders overlooked weak consumer confidence and housing numbers and kept the rally alive by focusing on positive big cap earnings.  The Dow closed up 35 points, only 45 points away from the 13,000 mark.  Major movers in the Dow included IBM (IBM | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating) and Honeywell (HON | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating) with gains of over 3%.

June crude futures pulled back from highs to close down 2% at $64.58 a barrel.  June gold futures fell 0.9% to $687.70.

The major European indices finished lower across the board in Tuesday's session.  Germany's DAX Index fell 0.9% to close at 7,270.32, France's CAC 40 Index fell 0.5% to 5,886.03, and Britain's FTSE 100 lost 0.8% to 6,429.50.

Today's PowerRatings Heat Map continues to show slight weakness in several sectors- Energy, Materials and Construction, and Manufacturing.  One of the interesting sectors from today's map is the Drug sector, which continues to show a divergence between high PowerRatings stocks and low PowerRatings stocks.  The best performing high PowerRating drug stock of the day is La Jolla Pharmaceuticals (LJPC | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating), which added 7%.  The worst performing low PowerRating drug stock was ArQule Inc. (ARQL | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating), which lost 1.4%.  Click here for a free trial to our PowerRatings Heat Maps.

Darren Wong
Associate Editor
darrenw@tradingmarkets.com