Day Traders Diary

3/19/10

U.S. stocks rose towards new 17-month highs at the open on Friday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 15 points to 10,796, led by a 3% advance in shares of Boeing. The aerospace giant said it will boost production rates of its two major commercial jet programs. The S&P 500 index rose a point to 1,167, while the Nasdaq Composite inched up 30 cents to 2,391. A number of disappointing earnings are hurting the market. SunPower is down 15% after beating estimates by a penny. Palm is down 25% after missing estimates by 19 cents. One analyst lowered his price target to zero for Palm today. Ouch. After the open the averages moved lower. Plenty of upgrades, but most stocks are lower. Salesforce.com, Research in Motion, Agrium, and U.S. Steel were upgraded, but all are lower. AT&T and Verizon are unchanged on upgrades. Staples, Kellogg, Gamestop, Best Buy, and Kohls were all upgraded and are all modestly higher. JP Morgan made positive comments on a number of transportation stocks, however, they are all lower. The financials are modestly lower. Goldman Sachs lowered estimates for a number of the big investment banks. Corning is one of the few techs trading higher. Corning received a number of upgrades this week. Google is lower as they are indicating that they will pull out of China next week. As the morning progressed the averages moved lower. In the afternoon the Dow dropped 60 points. The Nasdaq declined 19 points. Very few stocks are in the green. In the last hour the averages recovered a little. The Dow Jones Industrial Average finished down 37 points at 10,741. It rose 1.1% for the week. The S&P 500 fell 5 points to 1,159.9 points, while adding 0.9% for the week. The Nasdaq Composite fell 16 points to 2,374. It lagged the other indexes with a 0.3% weekly rise.

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