December 27, 1999 12:07pm
MARKET MIDDAY: Techs pull back
By Sergio G. Non ZDII
Blue chips were up and techs were down Monday morning as the Nasdaq pulled back from recent highs.
Around noon ET, the Nasdaq Composite Index was down 42.09 to 3,927.35, the S&P 500 had fallen 2.11 to 1,456.23, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average had risen 59.63 to 11,465.39.
All three indices closed at record highs on Thursday, the last trading day ahead of the Christmas holiday.
"The fact that Nasdaq is down is meaningless," said Donald Selkin, chief market strategist at Joseph Gunnar & Co. "It's just end-of-the-year shifting, it's meaningless."
Inter@ctive Week's @100 Index was down 77.47 to 6,295.34.
eToys (Nasdaq: ETYS) slid 4 1/8 to 26 13/16. Robertson Stephens analyst Lauren Cooks Levitan downgraded the online retailer of children's products was downgraded to "long-term attractive" from a "buy" rating.
Knight/Trimark (Nasdaq: NITE) gained 2 1/2 to 49 1/2. Chase H&Q analyst Greg Smith upgraded the market maker for online brokerages to "buy" from "outperform" and raised his price target to $60.
Enterprise software vendor HTE Inc. (Nasdaq: HTEI) rose 1 1/16 to 5 1/16, a gain of 26.6 percent. The company last week filed to take its DemandStar.com subsidiary public by selling shares to HTE stockholders and employees. DemandStar.com provides local government procurement over the Web.
JFax.com (Nasdaq: JFAX) picked up 1 23/32 to 7 19/32. The messaging services specialist unveiled a plan to offer fax services for Yahoo! Mail subscribers. Shares of Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO), caught up in the broader market decline, fell 20 3/16 to 382 7/16.
Novell (Nasdaq: NOVL) ascended 15/16 to 33 3/8, continuing its advance stemming from last week's announcement that Toshiba had licensed Novell's Internet caching system.
3D graphics chipset maker S3 (Nasdaq: SIII) advanced 1 3/4 to 12 5/16. On Friday, Taiwanese chipmaker Via Technologies agreed to buy 10.8 million shares of S3, boosting Via's S3 stake to 14.9 percent.
I.I.S. Intelligent Information Systems (Nasdaq: IISLF) dropped 1 11/16 to 4 5/16. The maker of peripherals for servers and mainframes settled shareholder lawsuits and said it would not complete the previously announced public spin-off of a network storage subsidiary.
Among other active stocks, Dell (Nasdaq: DELL) retreated 1 1/8 to 51 9/16, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) slid 1/4 to 117 3/16, Corel (Nasdaq: CORL) slid 1 7/64 to 17 43/64, and American depositary receipts of Globalstar Telecommunications (Nasdaq: GSTRF) picked up 7 7/16 to 35 5/8. |
