Sun, IBM Headline Eventful Day for Stocks

Sun (NASDAQ: JAVA) soared, stocks plunged, and IBM (NYSE: IBM) missed.

That about sums up Monday’s historic stock market action, which began with the surprise acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) and a steep plunge in the rest of the market on unease about lending losses at Bank of America (NYSE: BAC).

Sun shares soared nearly 37% on the merger news, while the rest of the market fell nearly 4%.

After the close, IBM shares lost 2% after the company beat earnings estimates but missed sales expectations. Big Blue reaffirmed its full-year earnings forecast, and gross margins were stronger than expected.

Also after the bell, Texas Instruments (NYSE: TXN) posted stronger than expected quarterly earnings and sales and even slightly raised guidance, but the company’s wireless sales were weaker than expected.

Even Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) lost ground during the day’s sell-off despite a Citi upgrade. Its shares closed off 0.6%.

Amazon will report its quarterly results on Thursday, when EMC (NYSE: EMC), Juniper (NASDAQ: JNPR) and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) will also report. AMD (NYSE: AMD) and Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) will release their earnings news Tuesday night, and Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL), eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY) and VMware (NYSE: VMW) will report on Wednesday. And a host of other companies will report results this week too.

The Nasdaq fell 65 to 1608, the S&P 500 lost 37 to 832, and the Dow plunged 289 to 7841. Volume declined to 8.27 billion shares on the NYSE, and rose to 3.11 billion on the Nasdaq. Decliners led by a 33-4 margin on the NYSE, and 23-4 on the Nasdaq. Downside volume was 96% on the NYSE, and 70% on the Nasdaq. New highs-new lows were 5-45 on the NYSE, and 3-23 on the Nasdaq.