AIG: Financial Winners & Losers
NEW YORK (
) --
AIG
(AIG) - Get Report
was one of the only actively-traded financial stocks Tuesday as the holidays and a snow storm sidelined much of Wall Street.
The
Financial Select Sector SPDR
(SPDR)
, a popular exchange traded fund that serves as a proxy for financial sector stocks, dropped a penny, or 0.03%, to $16.01 on roughly a third of its three month average daily volume.
Bank of America
(BAC) - Get Report
and
Citigroup
(C) - Get Report
, perennial volume leaders in the financial sector, both saw just a fraction of the usual activity.
Citigroup shares climbed a penny, or 0.21%, to $4.78 on volumes of just over 183 million shares, compared to a three month trailing average of 554 million. Bank of America shares rose by seven cents, or 0.53%, to close at $13.34 with 119 million shares trading hands, well below the average daily volume of 217 million shares over the past three months.
By contrast, AIG shares were a veritable beehive of activity. The shares opened at $61.46, up 3.5% from Monday's close. The shares had already seen big gains Monday as the bailed-out insurer
that some 36 banks had lined up to offer it some $4.3 billion worth of loans. Tuesday's bullish open may have been driven by a report in
The Wall Street Journal
that AIG's sale of
, its Taiwanese life insurance unit, is attracting bids of up to $3 billion.
Despite the strong open and the seemingly positive news, AIG shares, which have nearly double in 2010, dropped to a low of $57.72 in early afternoon trading before recovering some of those losses late in the day. They closed at $59.38, down 0.76% on the day. Volumes of 14 million shares were nearly triple their trailing three- month daily average of about 5.4 million.
--
Written by Dan Freed in New York
.
Disclosure: TheStreet's editorial policy prohibits staff editors, reporters and analysts from holding positions in any individual stocks.