CHICAGO TRIBUNE!!!!!!!!!!!!!<-----Well lets make it three newspapers today:
NY Times
USA Today and
Chicago Tribune
here is todays paper in the Chicago Tribune!!!
PRINT EDITION HOME
BLUE-CHIPS GLISTEN IN MARKET SWIRL
Bill Barnhart
April 8, 1999
Blue-chip stocks turned in a solid gain Wednesday on optimism about coming first-quarter earnings reports. But once again, the broad market was a loser.
The Dow Jones industrial average gained 121.82, or 1.2 percent, to a record closing high 10,085.31, on heavy New York Stock Exchange volume of 812 million shares.
Financial-services stocks led the blue-chip gainers.
AT&T, one of the 30 Dow industrials, rose $4.75, to $84.87, as investors sold rival MCI WorldCom amid reports that MCI was in talks to buy wireless communications firm Nextel.
Among broad stock indexes, the Standard & Poor's 500 index added 9.00, to a record closing high 1326.89. Nonetheless, losing stocks outnumbered winners by about an 8-to-7 ratio among NYSE-listed stocks.
The Nasdaq composite index pulled back 18.74 from Tuesday's record-high close, to 2544.43, and the Russell 2000 index of small-company stocks dropped 3.31, to 397.77.
After the close of trading, popular Internet stock Yahoo! posted first-quarter results higher than most Wall Street estimates. Its shares traded higher in after-hours electronic trading.
Earlier, Aluminum Co. of America posted better-than-expected first-quarter profits of 60 cents a share, down from 62 cents in the 1998 first quarter. Alcoa stock rose $2.94, to $44.
Stocks of on-line brokers continued to boom: Charles Schwab gained $8.75, to $116, and E*Trade Group added $8.50, to $84.50. Both were record closing highs.
Treasury bonds ended the day mixed in slow trading. The Treasury sold $7 billion of 30-year inflation-adjusted notes at a yield of 3.90 percent.
The bond market awaits Friday's scheduled release of the March producer prices report, which should indicate what impact, if any, the recent rise in oil prices has had on the wholesale price level. Analysts surveyed by Bridge News expected the March producer price index to show a 0.3 percent increase from February. That would reverse February's price decline of 0.4 percent from January.
Meanwhile, oil prices slumped in New York futures trading on reports of a build-up in inventories of crude. After threatening to break above $17 a barrel, oil for May delivery fell below $16 a barrel during Wednesday's session and ended down 76 cents, at $16.05.
On-line hoax: Investor chat rooms on the Internet went wild for several hours Wednesday morning when a fake news item appeared on a message board associated with the stock of PairGain Technologies.
The message said the California-based maker of telecommunications products had agreed to be acquired by an Israeli company at $15 a share, 76 percent higher than Tuesday's closing price.
The Web posting that alerted investors to the acquisition provided a link to an alleged news story on the Web site of Bloomberg News, a financial wire service. The page presenting the news release was a near duplication of an authentic Bloomberg News Web page. Shares of PairGain quickly jumped to $11.12 before investors sensed a fake.
"It was an impressive-looking press release (but) I realized early on that this was not a real story," said Anthony Elgindy, who operates Pacific Equity Investigations in Encinitas, Calif.
Elgindy, a short-seller, said he posted a warning in his chat site, part of the Silicon Investor site on Yahoo, when he could not obtain confirmation from PairGain officials and realized that the Nasdaq stock market had not halted trading in the stock. Typically, trading in a thinly held stock will be halted to allow for dissemination of a major news item about the stock.
Bloomberg subsequently issued a statement denying authorship of the news item. Later, PairGain denied the story.
Elgindy noted that the alleged buyer of PairGain was a company in Israel, where it was nighttime during Passover and confirmation would be difficult to obtain. Nonetheless, "it looked very credible on the surface. The greatest cons in the world are full of detail," he said.
"This is a classic case of a great Internet scam," said Fane Lozman, chairman of Chicago-based ScanShift, a market monitoring service.
Elgindy said regulators should be able to track who posted the false press release. "There are footprints," he said.
He noted that trading in PairGain stock has been unusually heavy in the last few days. With an average daily volume of less than 1 million shares, the stock traded 2.1 million shares Tuesday and 13.7 million shares Wednesday.
Despite the apparent hoax, PairGain stock closed up 87 cents, at $9.37. Several investors posting messages in Elgindy's chat room said they were sure a takeover deal was in the works.
Internet craze: A survey by PaineWebber and the Gallup Organization found that buyers of Internet-related stocks are young and highly optimistic about the stock market.
Overall, 15 percent of investors surveyed have owned Internet stocks, and 27 percent of investors under 40 years of age have dipped into the Internet stock waters. Young Internet stock buyers expected their portfolios to gain 31 percent in the next 12 months, double the expected return for investors generally.
"Given the broad media attention and heightened awareness among investors for many Internet stocks, one would think these shares are much more widely held than the (survey) findings suggest," said Mary Farrell, PaineWebber's senior investment strategist.
Send the text of this story to someone's email address
Browse the Tribune archive for other articles
RETURN TO TOP | HOME
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
QUESTIONS/COMMENTS | COPYRIGHT NOTICE AND TERMS OF SERVICE
|
