Stock Market News for January 19, 2010 - Market News
A day after closing at their multi-month peak, U.S. stocks registered their worst one-day decline of the year on Friday as concerns ranging from China’s move to curb bank lending to JP Morgan’s rising loan losses had investors selling shares. An unsatisfying reading on consumer sentiment also disappointed investors.
The week began with Alcoa (NYSE:AA) reporting numbers that came in below analysts’ estimates. Then, in an unusual rebuke of Chinese Internet censorship, the world’s most popular search engine Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) threatened to shut operations in China, citing sophisticated hacker assaults on its computer systems. Also, as traders tried to guess the market’s moves, equity markets hit their fresh 15-month intraday highs during the week before Friday’s slide eroded much of those gains.
On Friday, the blue-chip Dow Jones industrial average plunged almost 101 points as a tepid outlook from bellwether JP Morgan (NYSE:JPM) kept investors from making confident moves. The losses in JP Morgan’s retail banking unit also hurt the appetite for riskier assets as investors grew concerned about profits at other banks. During the week, Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS) retreated 5.2% and Bank of America (NYSE:BAC) fell 3.1%.
All S&P 500 industry sectors ended in the red as the index fell 12 points, or 1.1%, to 1136.03 and the Nasdaq composite lost 29 points or 1.2%, to close at 2287.99. On the New York Stock Exchange, declining issues were ahead of advancing shares by a two-to-one margin on volume of 1.4 billion shares. For the week, the Dow Jones industrial average closed down 8.54 points, or 0.1%, at 10,609.65. The S&P 500 index fell 8.95 points, or 0.8%, to 1,136.03. The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite index fell 29.18, or 1.3 percent, to 2,287.99.
As investors shunned riskier assets, bond prices rose and the corresponding yields declined. The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note fell to 3.68% from 3.74% late Thursday. An advance in dollar sent commodities lower. Crude prices fell $1.39 to $78 per barrel.
Telecom shares, off almost 4%, led seven out of the ten S&P 500 industry sectors lower during the week. Materials (-3.23%), Financials (-1.82%), Energy (-1.49%), Healthcare (-1.48%), and Consumer Discretionary (1.3%) sectors were the other notable losers during the week.
This week traders await results from Wells Fargo (NYSE:WFC) and Bank of America (NYSE:BAC) on Wednesday, Morgan Stanley (NYSE:MS) and Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS) on Thursday, as well as American Express (NYSE:AXP) on Thursday and General Electric (NYSE:GE), with its sizeable finance arm, on Friday. This week's focus may rest on the 66 S&P500 firms reporting.
Today companies reporting their numbers are Citigroup (NYSE:C), due out before the open along with Fastenal (NASDAQ:FAST), Forest Labs (NYSE:FRX), and Parker-Hannifin (NYSE:PH). Although investors are keeping their fingers crossed on Citigroup (NYSE:C) numbers, there are hopes that hardware strength would push IBM (NYSE:IBM) results higher to $3.47 from $3.28. Once again the risk of profit-taking remains with the shares already up 76% from November 2008 lows. Citigroup (NYSE:C) is expected to post a loss of 33 cents a share on revenues of $18.43 billion; year ago results showed a $1.99 per share loss and $18.1 billion in pre-tax write downs.
The preceding article is from one of our external contributors. It does not represent the opinion of Benzinga and has not been edited.
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