Tuesday’s Market Recap: Stocks End Mixed, US Dollar Rallies

Markets traded in a much tighter than normal range today (Tuesday) amid a number of fairly important news stories.  The indexed finished the day mixed as the Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI) lost -0.30% to close at 8,448.56.  The Nasdaq (^IXIC) and S&P 500 (^GSPC) on the other hand close up 0.50% and 0.18% respectively to levels of 1,546.46 and 871.79.  Markets started the day modestly higher but ending up giving back most of the gains.

Morgan Stanley (MS) and Citigroup (C) completed talks of their brokerage merger, although all the details have no been released.  Morgan Stanley will in fact have 51% ownership stake of the joint venture with the right to up this share in the future.  This merger will make the new joint venture brokerage the largest in the world.

Yahoo! (YHOO) announced today that Silicon Valley veteran Carol Bartz will be replacing Jerry Yang as the company’s Chief Executive Officer.  This comes after a long search which destroyed the company’s common stock after many activist shareholders requested that Jerry Yang step down.

The U.S. Dollar rallied heavily against the world currencies today as the U.S. Dollar Index (DX-Y.NYB) was up 1.44%.  The British Pound lost -2.02% against the dollar while the Euro lost -1.32% against the dollar.  The dollar also gained 0.26% against the Yen.  Despite this large move, crude oil traded up 2.82% to $38.65 a barrel while natural gas closed a horrible day down -6.26% to $5.20 per Mcfe.  Often times large moves in the dollar up or down will cause the exact opposite move for commodity prices that are denominated in dollars, but this was not the case today.

Investors go into Wednesday’s trading session still worried about Q4 2008 earnings reports which started to come out this week.  Early future’s indicated the markets were primed to lose a few points at tomorrow’s open.  Noteworthy earnings for the rest of the week including Becton, Dickinson & Co. (BDX), Ford Motor Company (F) and Ameriprise Financial (AMP) on Thursday with Johnson Controls (JCI), Sony Corp. (SNE) and Fortune Brands (FO) on Friday.

Disclosure: The mutual fund the author manages is long BDX and the author’s family is long both BDX and JCI.

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