Tuesday's Financial Winners & Losers
Financial stocks trended downward Tuesday, mostly moving in concert with the trailing
S&P 500
, but a few names managed to eke out gains.
Among these was Atlanta's
IntercontinentalExchange
(ICE) - Get Report
, which jumped 5.2% to $149.13 on word Standard & Poor's will add the commodities exchange to its 500 index after the close today.
optionsXpress
( OXPS), a Chicago-based online broker, will be added to the S&P SmallCap 600 tracker after Friday's close. Its shares climbed 4.5% to $25.58.
XL Capital
(XL) - Get Report
also traded higher after saying it will buy back up to $500 million worth of its shares. Shares of the Bermuda-based insurer added $1.28, or 1.7%, to $78.91.
In earnings, New York lender
Financial Federal
(FIF) - Get Report
gained 2.4% to $29.66 after beating Thomson Financial's estimates by a penny with a reported profit of 50 cents a share, or $12.7 million, in the quarter ended July 31.
Discover Financial Services
(DFS) - Get Report
posted better-than-expected income in its fiscal third quarter, as well, though it was 17.6% lower than last year on a per-share basis. The Illinois-based credit-card concern said it made $202.2 million, or 42 cents a share. Its stock lost 61 cents, or 2.7%, to $21.65.
Elsewhere, J.P. Morgan cut
Marsh & McLennan
(MMC) - Get Report
to neutral from overweight. The analyst cited the recent departure of Marsh Inc. CEO Brian Storms -- on the heels of which Marsh was downgraded at both Citigroup and Morgan Stanley -- saying this probably indicates continuing underperformance at the brokerage unit.
Shares of the New York-based company fell substantially out of the gate before lately recovering to a 3-cent dip at $24.77
And
Flagstar Bancorp
(FBC) - Get Report
slid again after Lehman Brothers and Friedman Billings each cut their price targets on the Michigan bank following yesterday's stock-pummeling conference-call update. Flagstar had said, among other things, that it will need to add between $12 million and $14 million to its loan-loss provision for the third quarter. Today, shares surrendered 7.1% to $10.82.
More broadly, the
NYSE
Financial Sector Index and the KBW Bank Index were respectively off 0.3% and 0.4%.