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Buying returns to Wall St.
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March 18, 1999: 1:54 p.m. ET
Stocks perk up in afternoon trading; investors like banks, oil and transports
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NEW YORK (CNNfn) - Wall Street shook off its morning uncertainty in afternoon trading Thursday, helping U.S. stocks head higher after two days of consolidation in the market following the Dow's brief encounter with 10,000.
Shortly after 1:30 p.m. ET, the Dow Jones industrial average was up 43.84 points, trading near its session highs at 9,923.25. Trading volume on the New York Stock Exchange was 509 million shares, with advances narrowly outpacing declines by a margin of 1,443 to 1,401.
The Nasdaq Composite climbed 17.56 to 2,446.53 and the broader S&P 500 index added 11.54 points to 1,309.36.
Analysts said unsurprising consumer price figures for February had dashed Wall Street's early hopes for outside encouragement, forcing it to wrestle almost entirely with its own technical factors.
"It was a little overbought," said Robert Robbins, market strategist at Robinson-Humphrey. "It's pausing . . . it's probably going to make another run at 10,000 in the next couple of days."
While uninspiring for Wall Street, the morning's data soothed bond traders with promises of dormant inflation, sending the price of the benchmark 30-year Treasury bond up 13/32 of a point and the yield down to 5.47 percent.
The dollar continued to fight hard against other global currencies, giving up ground against the yen but driving the euro back down to Wednesday's levels.
Oil and transports mix?
Investors found both transportation companies and big oil on the winning side, a relatively rare occurrence as rising petroleum prices usually give oil stocks a boost but depress the transports.
Dow component Exxon (XON) climbed 7/8 to 75-1/4 in response to leap in crude oil prices to a five-month high, while exuberant earnings news from Federal Express parent FDX (FDX) drove the express delivery service's stock up 6-15/16 to 99-7/8 and the Dow transports index up 89.27 points, or 2.7 percent, to 3,426.06.
Airline stocks also fed into the transport sector's advance, led by a triumphant performance from American Airlines holding company AMR (AMR), which rallied 4-1/8 to 61-5/8. Although AMR late Wednesday confirmed speculation that first-quarter profits will fall short because of a week long pilot strike in February, analysts said the market already had priced the probable losses into the stock price.
Banks were a third reservoir of upward momentum, surging dramatically in response to the bond market's gains and some bargain-hunting after the sector's recent retreat.
Among the blue chip bankers, American Express (AXP) climbed 4-1/8 to 125-1/16 and J.P. Morgan (JPM) leapt 3-1/8 to 123-5/8. Citigroup (C) jumped 1-5/8 to 64-3/8.
Outside of the Dow, Chase Manhattan (CMB) was up 1-7/16 to 83-13/16 on speculation the company is out looking for buyout targets. The Wall Street Journal had reported that the bank's CEO is willing to offer concessions in a bid to attract merger partners.
More bad news for PC makers
Dulling the broader market's enthusiasm, the computer sector chimed in with a gloomy note after fresh negative comments shook fragile confidence in the industry's growth outlook.
This time, Compaq (CPQ) was the company leading the retreat. Influential Piper Jaffray computer analyst Ashok Kumar singled Compaq out, saying that overall industry weakness would cause the company's first-quarter revenue and profits to fall short of Wall Street expectations.
Compaq shares fell 1-5/8 to 31-5/8 in response, while Dell (DELL), which sparked a broader sell-off last month amid similarly bearish comments from Kumar, shed 7/8 to 42-1/16. Computer makers among the Dow industrials were not immune, with IBM (IBM) falling 3-3/16 to 174-7/8 and Hewlett Packard (HWP) losing 1-3/4 to 71-7/16.
However, this time the selling did not extend beyond the core computer industry. Among other tech bellwethers, Microsoft (MSFT) climbed 2-13/16 to 169-15/16 and Intel (INTC) surged 1-9/16 to 122-1/16.
In the Internet sector, venture-capital firm CMGI (CMGI) soared 15-9/16 to 190-15/16 after a 2-for-1 stock split and amid reports it will fight the impending merger of Web portal Lycos (LCOS), in which it is a major shareholder, with USA Networks (USAI). Lycos tumbled 4-3/8 to 47-3/8, while USA Networks inched up 3/4 to 38-1/4.
Barnes & Noble (BKS) flew 6-1/16 to 34-15/16, a gain of 21 percent, after the bookseller set an initial stock offering for its Internet bookstore barnesandnoble.com. Online archrival Amazon.com (AMZN) shrugged off the news, climbing 6-1/4 to 137-1/4. 
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