Wall Street - Technology shares close flat in quiet pre-Christmas trade
Prices of technology shares closed relatively unchanged, with the Nasdaq composite's trading range only spanning 11.83 points throughout the shortened session amid very light volume ahead of tomorrow's Christmas holiday.
The Nasdaq composite closed off 1.34 points or 0.07% at 1,944.49 after opening at 1,946.84 and trading in a range of 1,942.07-1,953.90.
Volume was very light, with some 561 million shares changing hands. Advancing issues numbered 1,779, while 1,655 stocks posted declines and 329 remained unchanged on the day.
The Nasdaq 100 edged down 0.94 points or 0.06% to 1,577.33 and the Philadelphia semiconductor (Sox) index lost 5.46 points or 1.05% to 515.12.
The DJIA also closed basically unchanged, edging down 0.14 points to 10,035.20, while the S&P 500 eased 0.24 points to 1,144.65.
The market was unable to establish a firm direction amid a relative lack of corporate news and given the light trading activity with most market participants away from their desks ahead of the Christmas holiday tomorrow, dealers said.
"What we saw today was an inability to establish a firm market direction because there were few investors in the market and little fresh news to trade off," a trader at a major Wall Street investment house said.
There was also a relative lack of analyst calls to give investors who did participated in today's trading investment clues, dealers added.
Shares in Microsoft lost $0.27 or 0.40% to close at 67.27.
Microsoft launched a lawsuit against software start-up Lindows.com alleging that the name of the company's still-unreleased Lindows product is too similar to Microsoft's Windows and will confuse consumers.
Yahoo said its $436m bid for employment portal HotJobs was deemed more favourable than a rival bid from TMP Worldwide. TMP now has three days to match or respond to the Yahoo bid.
Yahoo shares closed down $0.27 or 1.60% at 16.65 and HotJobs shares rose $0.26 or 2.48% to 10.73.
Sun Microsystems shares put on 1.45% to close up $0.17 at 11.91 amid an upgrade to 'strong buy' from 'buy' by analysts at AG Edwards who said the stock could trade as high as $17.0.
Amongst other issues topping the list of most-active shares, Cisco lost $0.06 or 0.33% to 18.13, Oracle eased $0.04 or 0.29% to 14.33 and Intel gave up $0.40 or 1.24% to 32.0.
