Housing Sinks, Tech Tanks, Stocks Off Lows

  • November 18, 2009
  • David Goodboy

Stocks posted a valiant fight back toward breakeven after a slew of negative data knocked the market negative earlier in the session. Tight credit led to an unexpected drop in housing starts, while worse than expected earnings from several tech names weighed on that sector. Despite the general negativity of the day, stocks closed well off their intraday lows with the DJIA giving back just -11.11 to 10426.31, the tech heavy Nasdaq dropped -10.64 to 2193.14 and the broad based S&P 500 dipped -0.52 to 1109.80.

Advanced Micro Devices
(
AMD |
Quote |
Chart |
News |
PowerRating): Announced plans to offer senior notes, sending shares higher by 10.57% or 70 cents to $7.32.

La-Z-Boy
(
LZB |
Quote |
Chart |
News |
PowerRating): The furniture maker soared 29.25% or $2.10 to $9.28/share after beating the average analysts profit estimate by 24%.

Panera Bread
(
PNRA |
Quote |
Chart |
News |
PowerRating): Revealed some management changes and a $600 million share repurchase program sending the stock higher by 3.11% or $1.94 to $64.28/share.

E*Trade
(
ETFC |
Quote |
Chart |
News |
PowerRating): Added 9.03% or 14 cents to $1.69 after rival Ameritrade expressed potential interest in a buy out.

Oil climbed 44 cents to $79.70, gold advanced $1.90 to $1141.20 and the VIX index fell another 3.48% to 21.63.

Improve Your ETF Trading – Get your 7 day free trial to ETF PowerRatings, a simple ETF ranking system with nearly 80% winning trades since 2003…Click Here!

Market Snapshot

Dow

 -11.11 10426.31

NASDAQ

 -10.64 2193.14

S&P 500

 -0.52 1109.80

Economic
News

Retail Sales (Oct): Consensus: 0.9%, Prior: -1.5%, Revise From: -1.5%

Retail Sales ex-auto (Oct): Consensus: 0.4%, Prior: 0.4%, Revise From: 0.5%

Empire Manufacturing (Nov): Consensus: 30.00, Prior: 34.57

Business Inventories (Sep): Consensus: -0.7%, Prior: -1.6%, Revise From: -1.5%

Core PPI (Oct): Consensus: 0.1%, Prior: -0.1%

PPI (Oct): Consensus: 0.5%, Prior: -0.6%

Net Long-Term TIC Flows (Sep): Consensus: $35.0B, Prior: $28.6B

Capacity Utilization (Oct): Consensus: 70.8%, Prior: 70.5%

Industrial Production (Oct): Consensus: 0.4%, Prior: 0.7%

Housing Starts (Oct): Consensus: 600K, Prior: 590K

Building Permits (Oct): Consensus: 580K, Prior: 573K

CPI (Oct): Consensus: 0.2%, Prior: 0.2%

Core CPI (Oct): Consensus: 0.1%, Prior: 0.2%

Crude Inventories (11/13): Consensus: NA, Prior: 1.76M

Initial Claims (11/14): Consensus: 504K, Prior: 502K

Continuing Claims (11/13): Consensus: 5600K, Prior: 5631K

Leading Indicators (Oct): Consensus: 0.4%, Prior: 1.0%

Philadelphia Fed (Nov): Consensus: 12.0, Prior: 11.5