Stocks recovered from most of their losses, as investors reassessed Greece’s prospects for getting new bailout money and U.S. retail sales. Retail sales in January rose a seasonally adjusted 0.4%, short of forecasts for a 1% increase, mostly because of weakness in automobile sales. Tech stocks put in a mostly upbeat performance, with Apple, Rackspace Hosting among notable gainers. Apple rose 1.36% after it’s CEO Tim Cook spoke to a group of industry analysts at a Goldman Sachs technology conference in San Francisco. Rackspace climbed 12.6% on better-than-expected fourth-quarter results and upgrade at Benchmark Capital.analyst. Among other leading tech stocks, Micron rose more than 6%, and gains also came from Dell, Seagate and Netflix. Yahoo fell 4.7% following reports that talks to sell the company’s Asian assets had fallen apart. Google gave up 0.4%, even after the U.S. Department of Justice and the European Union gave approvals Monday to Google’s $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility. Implied volatility inched higher on moderate trading volumes.
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Bounced back on hopes for Greece
Stocks recovered from most of their losses, as investors reassessed Greece’s prospects for getting new bailout money and U.S. retail sales. Retail sales in January rose a seasonally adjusted 0.4%, short of forecasts for a 1% increase, mostly because of weakness in automobile sales. Tech stocks put in a mostly upbeat performance, with Apple, Rackspace Hosting among notable gainers. Apple rose 1.36% after it’s CEO Tim Cook spoke to a group of industry analysts at a Goldman Sachs technology conference in San Francisco. Rackspace climbed 12.6% on better-than-expected fourth-quarter results and upgrade at Benchmark Capital.analyst. Among other leading tech stocks, Micron rose more than 6%, and gains also came from Dell, Seagate and Netflix. Yahoo fell 4.7% following reports that talks to sell the company’s Asian assets had fallen apart. Google gave up 0.4%, even after the U.S. Department of Justice and the European Union gave approvals Monday to Google’s $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility. Implied volatility inched higher on moderate trading volumes.
