Stocks Drop Again Ahead of Presidents Day

On Thursday, Coca Cola(KO) was buzzing after strong overseas sales helped it to beat estimates. Friday its rival, snack and beverage maker PepsiCo (PEP) met expectations and its own guidance with its fourth-quarter results.

Shares of CocaCola and PepsiCo were down 1.2% and up 1.1%, respectively.

Struggling automakers continue to make headlines, asToyota (TM) said Friday that it will further scale back North American production, offer buyouts to 18,000 workers, and cut compensation for executives in the region by 30%. Toyota shares were off by 3% at $65.45.

Another company staying in the news, Sirius XM (SIRI) is now reportedly in talks with both satellite mogul Charles Ergen -- who controls Dish Network(DISH)and EchoStar (SATS)-- and rival Liberty Media.

Sirius shares gained 41.8% -- but that's just 3 cents - to 10.5 cents.

Economic data released on Friday include the University of Michigan preliminary consumer sentiment index for February, which fell to 56.2 from 61.2 a month prior, and by far undershot expectations for 61.5.

Thursday wielded an improvement in both January retail sales and initial jobless claims for the week ended Feb. 7, although the economists had expected a greater improvement in the latter.

The dollar was recently stronger against the yen, and weaker vs. the pound and euro.

In commodities, oil managed to make ups some ground, and rose $3.53 to settle at $37.51 a barrel. Gold fell $7 to settle at $942.20 an ounce.

Longer-dated Treasuries were recently mixed; the 10-year note was recently down 29.5/32 to yield 2.9%, the 30-year was losing 2 31/32, yielding 3.7%.

Stocks were overseas were mostly higher. In Europe, the FTSE in London was slightly off but the DAX in Frankfurt was slightly higher. In Asia, Japan's Nikkei and Hong Kong's Hang Seng locked in gains as well.

>To order reprints of this article, click here: Reprints