By Rex Crum, MarketWatch
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Tech stocks showed few signs of
life Tuesday, with losses across the board from the likes of
Hewlett-Packard Co. to Facebook Inc. to LinkedIn Corp. highlighting
another down day for the sector.
H-P (HPQ) was off by 2.6%, at $20.38 a share, a day ahead of the
company's annual meeting with Wall Street financial analysts.
Social-networking stocks were among those having a rough day,
with LinkedIn Corp. (LNKD) off by almost 7% at $221.10; Angie's
List Inc. (ANGI) down more than 6%, at $15.01, Facebook Inc. (FB)
falling nearly 5%, to $48.05 and Yelp Inc. (YELP) off by almost 9%
at $63.84 a share.
There was some speculation that continuing stock-market losses
may provide an impetus for U.S. lawmakers to reach some compromise
with President Barack Obama over the federal government shutdown
and budget crisis.
Among other tech stocks, Seagate Technology (STX) shed 8 cents a
share to trade at $45.08. The hard-disk drive maker said it
purchased 32.7 million shares of its stock from Samsung Electronics
Co. Samsung had received 45 million shares of Seagate stock when
Seagate bought Samsung's hard-disk drive division in 2011. Samsung
still owns about 12.5 million shares of Seagate stock.
Memory-technology company Fusion-io (FIO) was one of the few
gainers, rising 1.7% to $13.95 a share. Several other stocks that
had been up in early trading, such as Nvidia Corp. (NVDA), Western
Digital Corp. (WDC) and Apple Inc. (AAPL), retreated.
Apple fell almost $5 a share to $482.84 following reports that
the company will expand its iTunes Radio service to the United
Kingdom and Canada by early 2014. Pandora Media Inc. (P), which is
considered the leading Internet radio company, yet doesn't have
service agreements in the U.K. or Canada, was down nearly 8% at
$24.31 a share.
Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) shed 2.4% to fall to $302.32 a share, and
IBM Corp. (IBM) was down by 1.3%, at $179.62. A U.S. federal court
ruled in favor of Amazon in a case involving a cloud computing
contract with the Central Intelligence Agency. IBM wanted the
government to reopen the $600 million contract, which the CIA had
awarded to Amazon.
The Nasdaq Composite Index (RIXF) fell almost 59 points,or 1.5%,
to 3,712 and the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index (SOX) was down by
1.5%.
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