Telco Giant Takes Stake in Yahoo!

Technology stocks benefited from the relatively quiet atmosphere on Wall Street. What news was made reinforced the good feeling that has been in place for the last few days. A warning that oil prices could rise soon didn’t hurt either. Money moved out of energy stocks on the news that oil producers were considering production cuts in January.

The DJIA ended the day at 10,131, up 43 points at the close. The NASDAQ closed at 1976. up 16 points. The ISDEX ended the day up 1.7 points higher, to close at 180.

Yahoo! built on recent gains when it announced that telco giant SBC would buy three percent of the company from Softbank (which now owns 16 percent). Earlier this year, SBC and Yahoo! entered into a strategic relationship tying DSL services from various SBC companies with Yahoo!’s web services. SBC is the holding company for Ameritech, Nevada Bell, Pacific Bell, SNET, Southwestern Bell, and a joint venture with BellSouth for Cingular Wireless.

Yahoo! also seems to have concluded its attempt to buy HotJobs . TMP Worldwide said it would not bid any higher for HotJobs. Yahoo! ended the day up 26 cents to close at 17.77.

Semiconductors and computers benefited from a fairly bullish report from Merrill Lynch on AMD . Demand for AMD’s Athlon CPU was stronger than expected in the quarter, leading to a new forecast that AMD’s fourth-quarter loss estimate would be only 15 cents, down from 23 cents. AMD gained 50 cents to close at 16.12. Intel also rose to close at 32.67, up 38 cents.

Hewlett Packard bucked the trend, losing 0.5 percent on news that Walter Hewlett, son of co-founder William Hewlett, had filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission a proxy statement asking shareholders to vote against the merger with Compaq. Shares in Compaq rose 18 cents on the news.