Closing Bell: The bears wore their Crocs to work

Posted Jul 25th 2008 4:31PM by Jon Ogg
Filed under: After the Bell, Google (GOOG), Juniper Networks (JNPR), Crocs Inc (CROX), DJIA, Delta Air Lines (DAL)

If you were looking for another hard day of profit taking on a summer Friday, the markets escaped the hangman. A barely positive durable goods of big ticket items was enough to send the pessimists to the showers and gave the bulls a little more ammo. Throw in an oil ticker showing a drop of more than $2.00 to almost $123.00 per barrel and that's all that was needed. Look at bond yields and you'll see we gave back almost all of yesterday's move.

Here are today's unofficial closing bell levels:
DJIA 11368.33 (+19.05)
S&P500 1257.65 (+5.11)
NASDAQ 2310.53 (+30.42)
10YR T-NOTE 4.111% (+0.095%)
TOP ANALYST UPGRADES
TOP ANALYST DOWNGRADES
Select Short Sales Data

Arch Coal (NYSE: ACI) tripled earnings posted EPS of $0.78 vs. $0.64 estimates. The stock was up more than 3% in pre-open but was up almost 9% at $55.45 in the final minutes of the day.

Crocs Inc. (NASDAQ: CROX) led the garbage stocks after a very ugly earnings warning last night. It now sees sales for all of 2008 modestly lower than 2007 and is now only targeting a break-even result for 2008. Retailers were noted as keeping inventory re-orders at low levels, which is hard to blame them considering the ugly shoe fad has already started its workdown. Shares were down 44% at $4.99 after shares had already sold of more than 80% from 52-week highs.

Delta Air Lines Inc. (NYSE: DAL) posted sharp gains after Merrill Lynch raised the legacy carrier to a BUY rating. This held up despite an S&P downgrade in airlines and shares were up over 6% at $7.22 in today's final minutes.

Juniper Networks (NASDAQ: JNPR) raised guidance on strong demand for its networking equipment and Wall Street seems to be more than happy with Microsoft's recently ex-Online head coming over to run the entire company as CEO. We even saw Citigroup and FBR raise their ratings to lead the stock to being up 19% at $26.89 by the final minutes of the day.

Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) had a great day compared to the market after its rating was raised to Buy from Hold at Soleil Securities. Shares were up 3.4% at $491.95 in today's final minutes.

Wynn Resorts Ltd. (NASDAQ: WYNN) beat earnings at $1.11 EPS vs. $0.93 estimates, but the high-end casino player had a mixed revenue number with a weak Vegas and strong Macau. Shares had been up 35% since earlier in July, so traders sold the news slightly from yesterday's highs and shares were down 1.6% at $90.11 in today's final minutes.

Tags: aci, closing bell, ClosingBell, crox, dal, goog, jnpr, wynn