With volume light across all major indexes on a shortened trading holiday the day after Christmas, bargain hunting was about the thing traders could look for Friday, besides marvel at the online shopping numbers of Amazon.com
The e-commerce bellwether reported that the 2003 holiday shopping season was its busiest ever in its nine year history, with over 2.1 million units ordered in one day alone, which it said worked out to or 24 items per second worldwide.
Offline retailers such as Wal-Mart said they expected same-store sales to stay the same as it expected, suggesting that the real surge in last minute shoppers were at home in front of their computers instead of at the stores. The company’s shares closed up 8 cents at $52.52.
Amazon.com rose 53 cents on the day to close at $53.47 Friday.
The Nasdaq Composite closed at 1973.14, up 3.91. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed by 19.48 at 10324.67.
Among the most active in the tech sector, Microsoft closed up by 27 cents at $27.21, and IBM
closed up 63 cents to $92.90. Intel
added 28 cents to close up at $31.36.