Filed under: Microsoft (MSFT), MasterCard Inc’A’ (MA), Goldman Sachs Group (GS), Lehman Br Holdings (LEH), Bear Stearns Cos (BSC)

You can call on numerous issues for today’s big market rally. Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. (NYSE: GS) led the brokerage firms higher after beating earnings expectations, and that may have been equally as important to traders as today’s three-quarters of the way interest rate cut when it took Fed Funds down to 2.25%. Many traders were looking for a full 1% rate cut on the Fed Funds and Discount Rate. The Fed even delivered a cut after seeing a strong PPI number that was much more realistic than the CPI number of last week.

• DJIA 12,392.66 (+420.41; +3.51%)
• S&P500 1,330.74 (+54.14; +4.24%)
• NASDAQ 2,268.26 (+91.25; +4.19%)
• 10YR-TBond 3.451% (+0.137%)

The list of 52-week lows is far smaller on a giant rally like this, but as usual there are always some feature stocks that can’t manage to rally. There were some others noted this morning that just failed to participate, mostly from analyst downgrades.

Continue reading Closing Bell: Dow up 420 points thanks to the Fed, brokers back in action

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 6:54 pm and is filed under Stocks Money News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.