Whether you are a trader or an investor, you were probably as happy as Tom Cruise's "Joel" character in Risky Business to hear the closing bell today. Things were looking so promising this week that the media was pondering whether the bottom of the market had come and gone. That part remains unknown that feeling of bear market rallies has returned. The good news is that the auto snag did not bring about the massive down day as a recovery came in. The retail sales data came in slightly "less-bad" than expected.

General Motors Corporation (NYSE: GM) and Ford Motor Company (NYSE: F) were the two bogeys today. Their fate lies in the chances of NOT going bankrupt, and the cancellation of the bailout from the Senate was only greeted by less selling than one would expected when you saw 20% drops and worse in early trading. The good news is that this did not destroy most stocks as much as many feared earlier today, with GM even managing some gains by the end of the day.

Here are today's unofficial closing bell levels:

Dow 8,629.68 +64.59 (0.75%)
S&P 500 879.74 +6.15 (0.70%)
Nasdaq 1,540.72 +32.84 (2.18%)

Top Analyst Downgrades
Top Analyst Upgrades

Shares of biotechnology giant Genentech Inc. (NYSE: DNA) have been trading slightly lower despite the company posting yesterday evening that it beat analysts' per-share earnings estimates by 2 cents. Hurting the stock this morning are the company's sales of cancer drugs Avastin, which disappointed analysts.

Genentech announced that its profit during the first-quarter rose 12% to $790 million, or 74 cents per share, boosted by strong cancer drug sales. These numbers are up from $706 million, or 66 cents a share reported in the same period a year ago. Excluding special items, the company's earnings would have come at 84 cents a share, exceeding analysts' forecasts for a quarterly profit of 82 cents a share.

The company's quarterly revenue saw a growth of 8% to $3.06 billion, up from $2.84 billion a year ago. However, this was not enough to beat analysts' predictions for sales of $3.1 billion in the quarter, according to Thomson Financial.

Peregrine Pharmaceuticals Incorporated (NASDAQ: PPHM) is in such poor financial shape that it has been delisted has received a notice of its failure to meet continuing NASDAQ Capital Market requirements and may soon be delisted. The stock is currently priced at $0.70 and does not publicly trade.

Why should investors care whether a small biopharmaceutical company implodes like so many long-ago dot coms? Because Peregrine is running several important clinical trials testing whether its product, bavituximab, might be another weapon in the fight against prostate and breast cancers, diseases which kill tens of thousands of Americans every year. In the fight against cancer, every likely beneficial treatment scenario needs to be pursued aggressively.

Peregrine recently raised $21 million from institutional investors in order to fund the continued collection of data in its clinical trials. This is good news, except that the clinical trials are being run not in the US, but in India where there are fewer patient protection policies and data collection and analysis is much cheaper to produce. Presumably, credible evidence from the India clinical trials will convince the FDA to allow clinical trials using bavituximab in the US.

A recent piece of good news for Peregrine is that the Department of Defense is investigating whether bavituximab may be effective in treating hemorrhagic fever. It is possible that Peregrine will be awarded a five-year contract worth almost $45 million to develop treatment protocols and run clinical trials investigating this use of its product. Such a contract would help Peregrine immensely. In its most recent quarterly report, Peregrine recorded a net loss of $4.65 million, less than last year's $5.45 million loss, but hardly good news. Peregrine did post $1.6 million in earnings from its wholly owned contract drug manufacturing subsidiary Avid Biosciences. If bavituximab does prove effective in the fight against some types of cancer, and if the drug does win FDA approval for use in the U.S., then Peregrine will have in-house manufacturing facilities. The need for such expertise currently seems a long ways away for Peregrine, which may be an attractive buy-out candidate by a much larger pharmaceutical company.