Good morning traders!

US stocks started cautiously last night amid concerns that quarterly results may not live up to expectations, but broad-based profit taking maintained a bearish bias all day and prevented the indices from ever recovering.

A disappointment from Alcoa, which kicked off the Q4 earnings season, spurred the first batch of uncertainty while several pre-announcements in the tech sector essentially confirmed that a slowing in growth may be on the cards.

The Dow closed off 64.81 points at 10,556.22 with the Nasdaq 17.42 points shy at 2,079.62 and the S&P500 7.26 lighter at 1,182.99.

All major Asian markets are trading well down this morning in repsonse.

Back with some UK news in a mo......

Happy trading!

G.

Intel Corp. posted a slight drop in Q4 earnings despite a 9.8% gain in revenue for the period. After the close of Tuesday's market, the chip-making giant reported revenue of $9.6bn with earnings of $2.1bn, or 33 cents per share, compared to revenue of $8.7bn and earnings of $2.2bn, or 33 cents per share, for the same period last year.

i have found it hard to make money the last 2 weeks what about everyone else?

Morning all,woodie not spent much time in this game in the last 2 weeks sorry.

morning all.

dd just as well

Morning all,

My AIM shares aren't doing anything, my FTSE350 shares are mostly showing healthy
profits and in the US my portfolio is still heading northwards. Very little
profit taking, as I don't have time to actively trade daily anymore.

long WLW 38.5 s/l on

long TATE 461.5 s/l on

Good Morning all.

long TRY 129.50 s/l on

covered TATE + 4.25

MB I see you are having fun making money.

DXNS had a slow christmas - I'm not surprised. I went looking at large widescreen LCD TV's and was not impressed with what they (or anyone else had to offer). Full of cheap goods, nothing special - I hate to say it - I found things better value over the internet!

long RGU 81.25 s/l on

LW all due to the great man,you and i went to last may !!!!

long BUR 450 s/l on

long TATE 463 s/l on

long SOF 153.75 s/l on

little woman - I see from your post that you were shopping for a widescreen LCD TV. I hope that you didn't get one yet. There was a report on CNBC Europe (SquawkBox) last week that said that the cost of these lasrge LCD TVs will drop dramatically this year. It transpires that Phillips (and others) expected to be selling tons of these and so built three new factories in China/Taiwan (or somewhere in the east) last summer to cater for the demand. They reported last week that they will be shutting down at least one of these factories since demand for the product was much much lower than they expected. They now have an LCD TV mountain to get rid of. Hence, bargain price later this year.

Thanks StarFrog. I was looking for a Phillips one! Hope I don't have to wait too long!

MB - not shorting? I used to use Crocs software but when the updates stopped I had to stop too :-(

little woman - Looking at Philips LCD here too. 42" around 2,900 euros. Needs to come down a bit from that before I get one. :-(