The Night Watch: The Calm After the Storm
In typical Friday fashion, the after-hours markets lay pretty still as traders headed out from New York City to the Hamptons for a weekend in the sun. This evening's market was perhaps even a bit quieter than usual after a week chock full of earnings warnings sent the three major stock indices -- the
Dow, the
Nasdaq Composite, and the
S&P 500 -- all down to seven-week closing lows.
The list of most actives was composed mostly of large-cap tech stocks. Few of the stocks made any significant price movements in the postmarket session, and trading volume remained very light.
After
warning last night that sales for the current quarter wouldn't meet expectations,
JDS Uniphase
(JDSU)
tumbled 9.9% during the regular trading hours. The stock picked up a little of the day's losses in the after-hours, creeping up 11 cents, or 0.9% on
Instinet
, and up 8 cents to $12.52 on
Island ECN
after-hours trading.
Slipping slightly to the downside on Island was networker
Juniper Networks
(JNPR) - Get Report
, down one cent to $31.13. Computer-maker
Dell
(DELL) - Get Report
gained one cent on Island to land at $24.33. Meanwhile, Instinet saw chipmaker
Intel
(INTC) - Get Report
gain 12 cents to $27.80. Despite Intel's optimistic mid-quarter update several weeks ago, a recent onslaught of warnings has dragged the chipmaking powerhouse down with the rest of the sector. Intel fell 10% between last Friday's close and the close of the market yesterday, but crept back up 0.3% during today's trading.
Trading just barely into the green tonight was another subset of large-cap tech players, as
Sun Microsystems
(SUNW) - Get Report
rose 0.7% or 11 cents to $15.30, and
WorldCom
(WCOM)
gained 2 cents to $15.82 on Instinet. Shares of
Oracle
(ORCL) - Get Report
rose 6 cents to $15.06.
Microsoft
(MSFT) - Get Report
remained unchanged in share price, but was among the most actively traded stocks on Instinet tonight.
360Networks
(TSIX)
, which dropped under the $1 mark just recently, took a beating today after it announced that it won't be able to pay off $10.9 million in debt on time. Credit rating agency
Moody's
then cut the company's unsecured and secured debt ratings a few hours later. The company's stock fell 30.2% during the day, and said later in the day that it would not rule out bankruptcy protection in the future. Shares of the stock fell another 10%, or 3 cents, on Island tonight, before rebounding to end the session unchanged.
Finally, biotech company
Immune Response
(IMNR)
soared 154.8% today on positive clinical reports about a drug licensed by the company for HIV-positive patients. In the after-hours, traders took some profits, sending it back down 10.5%, or 42 cents, to $3.58.
Island ECN offers trading, mainly in Nasdaq-listed stocks, from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. EST.
Confused?
TheStreet.com
explains how the rules change when the sun goes down in Investing Basics: Night Owl, a section devoted to after-hours trading.