Knight Capital Shares Continue to Drop: Hot Trends

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Popular searches on the Internet include Knight Capital Group (KCG) as the troubled company's stock continued to fall early Friday, after plummeting over the past couple of days.

Knight Capital fell 33% on Wednesday, and an additional 63% on Thursday. The firm announced Thursday that a software glitch had caused trading errors in nearly 150 stocks in early trading hours on Wednesday. Knight Capital said it suffered a loss of $440 million as a result of the glitch.

The stock edged closer to $2 in premarket trading on Friday.

Many brokerage firms are avoiding trading through Knight Capital for the time being. Knight released a statement indicating it is looking to raise capital.

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Procter & Gamble (PG) is trending as the consumer products company posted a higher-than-expected quarterly profit, boosted by price increases and the sale of its snacks business.

P&G said it earned $3.63 billion, or $1.24 a share, in the fourth quarter, compared with $2.51 billion, or 84 cents a share, a year earlier. Profit excluding items was 82 cents a share, compared with analysts' estimates of 77 cents.

P&G said price increases added 4% or more to net sales growth in the quarter, while the sale of its snacks business added a net gain of 48 cents a share.

The company also said it would repurchase $4 billion worth of its shares this fiscal year, despite indicating in June that it did not plan to do so.

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Tobacco is another popular search upon a recent report indicating that sales of tobacco to minors reached an all-time low in 2011.

According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration, 8.5% of retailers broke the law by selling tobacco to minors in the last fiscal year, down from about 40% in 1997. The level is the lowest ever tracked under the Synar Amendment program.

Under the Synar Amendment, all states must have laws and enforcement programs to bar the sale and distribution of tobacco products to minors and every state must document that the rate of tobacco sales to minors is no more than 20%. The last fiscal year was the sixth year in a row that no state reported a rate above 20%. Nevada had the lowest rate of sales of tobacco to minors at 1.1%, while Oregon had the highest at 19.3%. The administration said 12 states had a violation rate below 5%.

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