Tag - Fcl

Small-cap stocks fell hard on the opening, pressured by a run of weak guidance projections on recession fears from the flood of quarterly earnings reports and by a steep slide in equity markets around the world overnight. At 9:56 a.m. ET, the Russell 2000 (NYSE:IWM) was down 10.54, or 1.99%, at 520.27.

Even before we got this jolting steep opening slide this morning, it was a wild overnight ride for stock market futures. S&P 500 and Nasdaq futures saw ranges beyond 4% as the market rallied right after Tuesday’s close on solid earnings from Apple Inc. (Nasdaq:AAPL) and Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO). The strong results from those firms set in motion a big run in the tech sector and even though those gains were relinquished by today’s opening, tech stocks were still outperforming the broad market, which is a switch from recent trends. AAPL was up about 6% and YHOO some 3% on the open. The Nasdaq 100 was down about 1% shortly after the open.

Another positive story on the earnings front came from McDonald’s Corporation (NYSE:MCD), which topped the forecast and rose at the opening, but is now down 1.49%. From a pessimist viewpoint, the bears will say that “Mickey Dees” is the only restaurant people will be able to afford in a prolonged recession.

Outside of the earnings flood, SanDisk Corp. (Nasdaq:SNDK) tumbled some 25% in after-hours trading after Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. withdrew a $5.9 billion bid for the flash memory card maker. SNDK was down 29% early on.

Earlier this morning, the MBA Mortgage Application Index fell sharply, sinking 16.6% to the lowest point in nearly eight years, which underscores ongoing troubles in the housing market. Mortgage rates upticked into that survey period, which likely hurt the application activity, but with home prices not doing well, secondary mortgage activity remains soft and we already saw single-family home sales collapse to 26-year lows on last week’s economic data. In addition, there are reports that homes . . .