Terrorism warnings and rising tensions in Iraq and North Korea combined with downgrades and warnings to keep stocks under pressure on Wednesday.
The Nasdaq fell 16 to 1278, the S&P 500 lost 10 to 818, and the Dow dropped 84 to 7758. Volume declined to 1.25 billion shares on the NYSE, and 1.22 billion on the Nasdaq. Decliners led 22-10 on the NYSE, and 21-10 on the Nasdaq. Downside volume was 80% on the NYSE, and 82% on the Nasdaq. New highs-new lows were 28-154 on the NYSE, and 39-99 on the Nasdaq.
After the close, Brocadematched estimates, Cognizantbeat estimates, and TMP Worldwidemissed estimates and declined to give guidance.
During the day, Applied Materialsslipped 1% after missing estimates. Sycamoreand Network Appliancealso declined on their results.
Merrill Lynchdidn’t help the mood any when it said it doesn’t expect tech spending to improve until 2004-2005.
DoubleClickwas a rare bright spot, surging 8.6% on rumors of a deal with AOL.
Yahoo, off 0.7%, made a push into the UK broadband market with British Telecom and held an analyst meeting.
IBM, down 1.2%, won a major outsourcing contract.
Borlandrose 2.8% after releasing new Java application products.
Microstrategy, Business Objects, Cognizant, Actuateand Briofell on concern about competition from Microsoftin the business intelligence space.
Expedia, off 1.5%, is offering sports tickets to travelers.
Sun, down 1.5%, unveiled a network computing initiative online.
Oracle, off 3.5%, expanded its storage partnership with Hitachi.
Market Commentary: For our free daily market commentary and technical analysis, please visit the InternetStockReport.com home page at:
http://www.InternetStockReport.com.