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US markets rise Wednesday

09 April 2009 09:17 (UTC +04:00)

Baku. Vahab Rzayev - APA-Economics. Stocks mostly rose in cautious trading Wednesday as investors cherry-picked insurance, technology and homebuilding stocks on bits of good news for those industries. In late afternoon trading, the Dow Jones industrials slipped 0.72, or less than 0.1 percent, to 7,791.71. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index rose 4.68, or 0.6 percent, to 820.23, and the Nasdaq composite index rose 19.26, or 1.2 percent, to 1,580.87.
Traders jumped on some glimmers of hope that emerged from the homebuilding and insurance industries.
Cisco Systems Inc. added 1 percent, while Microsoft Corp. gained 2 percent.
Some traders were hopeful that regulators would soon move to curb short-selling, in which traders try to profit from a stock’s decline by selling borrowed shares.
In other trading Wednesday, the Russell 2000 index of smaller companies rose 4.76, or 1.1 percent, to 436.46.
About two stocks rose for every one that fell on the New York Stock Exchange where volume came to a light 923.2 million shares.
Bond prices rose Wednesday. The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note, which moves opposite its price, fell to 2.85 percent from 2.90 percent late Tuesday.
The dollar was mixed against other major currencies. Gold prices rose.
Light, sweet crude rose 15 cents to $49.30 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
Overseas, Japan’s Nikkei stock average fell 2.7 percent. Britain’s FTSE 100 rose 0.2 percent, Germany’s DAX index rose 1.2 percent and France’s CAC-40 rose 0.4 percent. Source: AP