Market Trades Lower on Choppy Trading

Published on Monday, 23 January 2012 13:17 Written by J Hawk

New York, January 23^rd (TradersHuddle.com) - U.S. stocks traded lower at mid-day after stock indexes opened higher in early trading. The Dow Jones Industrial Average turned negative midday after having been up as much as 35 points earlier in the session. Other indices soon followed suit selling off shortly afterwards with the Dow down -36.22 or -0.28%, the NASDAQ down -8.60 or -0.31%, and the S&P 500, off -2.76 or -0.15%.

No significant economic news was released this morning as traders reacted positively to news out of Europe that Greece would arrive at an agreement with private creditors on a debt swap before March 20^th. The news sent the Euro to a five week high against the U.S. Dollar, which gave support to world equity markets.

Also affecting equity and commodity markets was news that the European Union had banned imports of oil from Iran, joining the United States in sanctions to discourage Iran from developing nuclear weapons. The news sent crude oil and precious metals prices higher.

U.S. Stocks in the News

Research In Motion (NASDAQ: RIMM) stock was down -1.10 or -6.47% after having been higher in earlier trading. RIMM stock was third on the NASDAQ’s most actives after the company announced it was appointing Thorsten Heins as the new Chief Executive Officer. The Canadian based manufacturer of Blackberry phones has run into considerable difficulty with competition from Apple’s iPhone and Android phones, manufactured by a number of companies.

RIMM’s investors are growing increasingly impatient for the company to make improvements and speculation in the market exists about whether the new CEO has been hired to turn the company around or prepare it for sale. 

Intel Corp. (NASDAQ: INTC) stock was up +0.47 or +1.78% to 26.85 after the company announced it had reached an agreement with QLogic to acquire product lines and assets related to its InfiniBand Business. The acquisition of assets by Intel will have many of QLogic employees working in the related business, accepting offers to work for Intel.

Intel is looking to enhance its networking portfolio providing high performance computing (HPC) fabric technology and assist in the company’s innovating of fabric architectures to achieve ExaFlop/s (quintillion operations per second) performance by 2018.

Halliburton (NYSE: HAL) stock was down -1.23 or -3.4% to 34.97 after the company announced fourth quarter earnings of $921 million or $1.00 per share. The company’s consolidated revenue for the Q4 was $7.1 billion, compared to $6.5 billion in the same quarter last year.

In a statement after the earnings release, chief executive officer, chairman and president Dave Lesar said, "I am very pleased with our fourth quarter and full year 2011 results, which set records for revenue and operating income.”

Apache Oil (NYSE: APA), stock was up +0.31 or +0.32% to 97.11 after the company announced it would acquire Cordillera Energy Partners for $2.85 billion in cash and stocks.  The acquisition will add operations in Oklahoma and Texas which use hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” to get oil and natural gas.

The takeover will double Apache’s holdings in the Andarko basin and will add an estimated 71.5 million barrels of oil in proven reserves to the Houston based company.