Market Update: Major Indices in the Green Near Midday Despite IBM's, H-P's Woes

In the early going, the stock market's major indices were moving to the upside, after merger action and Wall Street's comments on Big Blue put pressure on tech shares in the early going.

Lately, the

Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 43 to 11,263, with a 2% gain from

J.P. Morgan

(JPM) - Get Report

. The investment bank was rallying on news that its CFO Peter Hancock resigned. Chief Administrative Officer Thomas Ketchum will replace Hancock immediately.

Although the Dow was in positive territory, blue-chip losses from

IBM

(IBM) - Get Report

and

Hewlett-Packard

(HWP)

were tempering the index's gains.

This morning,

Goldman Sachs

lowered

IBM's

(IBM) - Get Report

fourth-quarter estimates to $1.50 from $1.53 a share and moved fiscal 2000 estimates to $4.45 to $4.50 a share. Analyst Laura Conigliaro attributed the revisions to weakening currency exchange rates.

Discounting the negative impact of the exchange ratios, Conigliaro upped her third-quarter growth estimate to 10.3% from 9.7% due to the strength in semiconductors, Unix servers and disk storage. IBM was lately off 2.8%.

Hewlett-Packard was skidding 3.3% after on reports that it is negotiating a possible acquisition of

PriceWaterhouseCoopers

consulting arm.

TheStreet.com

wrote about this in an earlier

story.

The

Nasdaq was bouncing back from a down open, up 21 to 3999. The tech laden index was initially held down by some merger action in the biotech sector.

Genzyme General

(GENZ)

slipped 11.1% after it entered a cash and stock deal to buy

GelTex Pharmaceuticals

(GELX)

for nearly $1 billion. GelTex popped 15.9% on the news.

Elsewhere, the broad

S&P 500 was lifting 0.7%, while the small cap

Russell 2000

was 0.4% higher.

TheStreet.com Internet Index

was up 1.6%.

Market Internals

Breadth was mixed on moderate volume.

New York Stock Exchange: 1,410 advancers, 1,031 decliners, 338 million shares. 128 new 52-week highs, 18 new lows.

Nasdaq Stock Market: 1,666 advancers, 1,850 decliners, 548 million shares. 52 new highs, 37 new lows.

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Most Active Stocks

NYSE Most Actives

Nortel (LU) : 9.3 million shares.
Lucent (LU) : 6.2 million shares.
AT&T (T) - Get Report: 5.7 million shares.

Nasdaq Most Actives

Cisco (CSCO) - Get Report: 21.7 million shares.
WorldCom (WCOM) : 20 million shares.
Intel (INTC) - Get Report: 14.1 million shares.

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