NEW YORK — As U.S. stocks on Friday tallied another week of declines, the technology-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index remained positive for the year, ahead of next week’s earnings reports from some of tech’s major players.
On Friday, telecommunications and energy shares paced Wall Street’s declines, with information-technology and industrial issues fronting the limited gains; the market finished mostly down for the day.
The Dow Jones industrial average stood at 8,146.52, off 36.65 points, or 0.5 percent, giving it for a weekly fall of 1.6 percent. The S&P 500 Index shed 3.55 points, or 0.4 percent, to 879.13, a slide of 1.9 percent from the week-ago close. The finish marked the fourth down week in a row for the Dow and S&P.
The Nasdaq gained 3.48 points, or 0.2 percent, to end at 1,756.03, off 2.3 percent for the week, its second consecutive weekly slide.
On Monday, semiconductor-maker Novellus Systems Inc. is scheduled to report its results, while chip giant Intel Corp. is slated to report second-quarter results Tuesday. Intel, the world’s No. 1 maker of computer microprocessors, is expected to report a sharp drop in sales and earnings.
But investors are more likely to be tuned in to what the company’s executives say about the business outlook.
“The market will be looking at Intel’s sales and margin guidance. The linkage between production and inventory has stabilized the chip sector, but the market will want to see signs of accelerating end demand to keep stock prices trending higher from the spring low,” said Nick Kalivas, equity analyst at MF Global Research.
On Friday, hardware companies including Dell Inc. drew an upgrade from Goldman Sachs analyst David Bailey, who expects hardware stocks “to continue to move higher through the second half of the year and into 2010 as fundamentals from stabilization to growth (as well as) multiples begin to normalize.” But Harry Rader, chief executive and portfolio manager for Rady Asset Management, has a far more bearish take on the economy and technology, which has outperformed other sectors, leaving the Nasdaq up more than 11 percent since 2009 began.
Conversely, the Dow industrials are off 7.2 percent for the year so far, while the S&P 500 is down 2.7 percent for the same period.
The only difference between tech and other market sectors is that “technology has been in favor; a number of the stocks have gotten way ahead of themselves,” Rader said.
Rader believes the stock market is ripe for a rotation “out of technology and into something else,” and lists BMC Software Inc. and Computer Sciences Corp. as among the tech stocks now being shorted by his firm.
Citrix Systems Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co., Motorola Inc., McAfee Inc., Palm Inc. and Teradata Corp. also will be on Rader’s list of short candidates “if they moved up another 3 percent to 5 percent,” he added.
