Stocks Start Up, End Down

Stocks began the day up on Monday, only to sell off into the close.

The Nasdaq lost 17 to 1392, the S&P 500 declined 9 to 900, and the Dow fell 92 to 8486. Volume declined to 1.27 billion shares on the NYSE, but rose to 1.76 billion on the Nasdaq. Decliners led 18 to 14 on the NYSE, and 19 to 13 on the Nasdaq. Downside volume was 59% on the NYSE, and 54% on the Nasdaq. New highs-new lows were 39-33 on the NYSE, and 60-45 on the Nasdaq.

After the close, Agilent rose after topping estimates.

During the day, stocks initially rose on a double-digit handset sales projection from Nokia , but tech stocks eventually succumbed to profit-taking after the Nasdaq failed to clear its August high.

VeriSign rose 7% on Web hosting alliances.

eBay rose 2.5% on the launch of an electronics superstore aimed at Amazon.com , which itself gained on better than expected apparel sales. Amazon also said it will sell the Segway Human Transport, code named “Ginger.”

Microsoft , off 1.5% had a slew of announcements for Comdex. Microsoft also for the first time broke down earnings by product line. The client, or Windows, division, had operating income of $2.48 billion on sales of $2.89 billion in the third quarter. The information worker, or Office, division had income of $1.88 billion on sales of $2.39 billion. Home and entertainment, including the Xbox, lost $177 million on sales of $505 million, and the MSN Internet service also lost money.

Intel and AMD squared off with chip announcements.

AOL announced a new online chief and was named in a Homestore lawsuit.

Computer Associates gained 1.5% after founder Charles Wang resigned.

HP launched an ad campaign and took on Dell in the PDA space. Dell, off another 3% on earnings that weren’t everything Wall Street was looking for, debuted new storage systems.

Palm rose 3.5% on plans for a wristwatch PDA.

Broadcom rose 4.7% on new networking components for blade servers.

SBC gained 1.8% on new bundled services.

Sun managed a 1-cent gain on new data cluster technology.

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