US Markets Retrace Some Of Monday’s Losses

Markets regained some of their losses from Monday’s enormous sell off with a solid trading session owned by the bulls. The Dow was in the green 270 points, and closed at 8,419 points. The Nasdaq and S&P gained 51 and 32 points respectively. The Nasdaq finished the day at 1,449 points, and the S&P finished at 848 points. Smaller companies fared well as the Russell 2000 was up 15 points and closed at 432 points. In international trading Britain’s FTSE 100 rose by 57 points and finished at 4,122 points. Japanese trading was down as the Nikkei 225 was in the red by 533 points, and closed at a 7,863.

Light, Sweet Crude fell again in the NYMEX to $46.96 per barrel. Analysts are predicting a rally of some sort coming soon as weather gets colder, OPEC makes a more drastic cut at next months meeting, and demand slowly comes back due to lower prices. Gasoline futures fell on to $1.06 a gallon. Heating oil dropped to $1.58. Natural gas prices finished trading at $6.24, after falling 18 cents.  OPEC made no move over the weekend but many analysts believe they will not go two meetings without making a move.

The Federal Reserve announced that it will extend the life of programs aimed to ease the credit crunch from January 30 to April 30. A lending facility makes cash available for investment companies if necessary is one example of the programs that will be extended for a longer period.

Former AOL CEO Jon Miller is reported to be making an attempt to buy Yahoo (YHOO). Miller believes Yahoo to be worth a little over $20 per share and has been talking to private equity investors about raising the money.

General Motors (GM) said it needed a federal loan of $18 billion to survive. In a plan presented to congress today, GM also said it needed an immediate loan of $4 billion to make it through 2009. The plan also states that the company will attempt to cut workers and dealers to reduce more costs. November sales fell 41% for GM and 47% for Daimler AG (DAI). The third of the “big three”, Ford (F), suffered a smaller decrease in sales of 31%, but said it would only need a stand-by line of credit amounting to $9 billion. Ford may not even need to use that stand-by loan because they surprisingly expect to make it out of this mess without government aid.

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