Stocks ended slightly higher on Wall Street Thursday as gains in energy and chemical companies pushed the market higher.?Even with plenty of earnings news from big companies, stocks have shuffled between minor gains and minor losses.
By Matthew Craft,?AP Business Writer / July 25, 2013
Trader Neil Catania, left, and Mark Muller, right, confer on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Good earnings from energy and chemical companies helped boost stocks Thursday.
Richard Drew/AP/File
Enlarge
Gains in energy and chemical companies helped nudge the stock?market higher Thursday.
Skip to next paragraph
' +
google_ads[0].line2 + '
' +
google_ads[0].line3 + '
'; } else if (google_ads.length > 1) { ad_unit += ''; } } document.getElementById("ad_unit").innerHTML += ad_unit; google_adnum += google_ads.length; return; } var google_adnum = 0; google_ad_client = "pub-6743622525202572"; google_ad_output = 'js'; google_max_num_ads = '1'; google_feedback = "on"; google_ad_type = "text"; // google_adtest = "on"; google_image_size = '230x105'; google_skip = '0'; // -->
Subscribe Today to the Monitor
Click Here for your FREE 30 DAYS of
The Christian Science Monitor
Weekly Digital Edition
The modest move extends a pattern seen this week: Even with plenty of earnings news from big companies, the broader market has shuffled between minor gains and minor losses.
Cabot Oil & Gas and Range Resources reported revenue and earnings that trumped estimates, sending their?stocks?up 7 percent. Cabot climbed $4.85 to $76.56. Range Resources rose $5.34 to $81.39.
Facebook soared 30 percent after reporting earnings late Wednesday that easily beat analysts' forecasts thanks to higher revenue from ads on mobile devices. Facebook's?stock?gained $7.85 to $34.36.?
Nearly halfway through the second-quarter earnings season, the overall trend looks good, but not great, said Tyler Vernon, chief investment officer of Biltmore Capital in Princeton, N.J. "There have been some big disappointments, like Caterpillar yesterday, but we're seeing better and better numbers coming out."
The Standard & Poor's 500 index gained 4.31 points, or 0.3 percent, to close at 1,690.25.
The Dow Jones industrial average rose 13.37 points, or 0.1 percent, to 15,555.61. The Dow was held back by Home Depot and Caterpillar, which warned Wednesday that its sales could sag.
The Nasdaq composite index gained 25.59 points, or 0.7 percent, to 3,605.19.
Analysts forecast that companies in the S&P 500 index will report earnings growth of 4.3 percent over the same period last year, according to S&P Capital IQ. At the start of July, the forecast was for growth of 2.8 percent. More than six out of every 10 companies have cleared analysts' earnings targets so far.
Improving profits should help push the S&P 500 index above 1,700 in the coming weeks, Vernon said.
D.R. Horton, the country's largest builder, and PulteGroup said orders for new houses jumped in the second quarter, but their results still fell short of what analysts had expected. PulteGroup also posted a 14 percent decline in profits
D.R. Horton dropped $1.82, or 9 percent, to $19.38. PulteGroup lost $1.90, or 10 percent, to $16.55, the biggest drop of any?stock?in the S&P 500.
"I think what you're seeing a bit of today is people questioning what higher mortgage rates mean for housing," said JJ Kinahan, chief strategist at TD Ameritrade in Chicago.
In the market for U.S. government bonds, the yield on the 10-year Treasury note was unchanged from late Wednesday at 2.59 percent. Late last week, it was trading at 2.48 percent.
The 10-year yield acts as a benchmark rate for most mortgage loans. A sharp increase in the rate drives up mortgage costs and could slow down sales in the housing market.
It's still very low by historical standards, thanks in large part to the Federal Reserve's massive bond-buying program. The 10-year Treasury yield hit a recent low of 1.63 percent on May 3. By contrast, it was trading around 4 percent in the summer of 2008, shortly before the worst days of the financial crisis.
The Russell 2000 index of small-company?stocks?set another record high, gaining 10.35 points, or 1 percent, to 1,054.18. The Russell has trounced other indexes this year, gaining 24 percent versus 19 percent for the S&P 500 and the Dow.
Among other?stocks?making big moves:
? Las Vegas Sands, a major casino operator, fell 55 cents, or 1 percent, to $54.40 after it posted lower revenue and income than financial analysts had expected.
? Visa rose $7.86, or 4 percent, to $194.61. Visa returned to profitability in its third fiscal quarter and reported strong revenue growth as the company processed more transactions worldwide.
Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/6wXtBPJceZA/Stocks-gain-slightly-on-energy-earnings
Real Madrid Neverwinter George Jones Farrah Abraham Tape amber heard Google Now Jason Collins
Earlier this week we posted some new images of what looked like credible images of Sony?s upcoming flagship, codenamed ?Honami?. Well some new images have surfaced from the same website, Gadget Helpline, that show the same handset sized up against the Xperia Z (C660X). As you can tell from the first couple of pictures, both handsets have a very similar design, although Honami appears to be a little longer. A number of additional images show some of the camera user interface, most of which we have seen previously. One screenshot shows the various camera modes including Superior auto, Manual, Timeshift burst, Picture effect, AR effect, Info-eye, Social live and Sweep Panorama. Another couple of pictures shows the AR effect (Augmented Reality) mode in action. Check out all of the pictures below. Via Gadget Helpline . Thanks David and Thomas! ...