This holiday shortened fourteenth trading week of 2012 comes to a close with investors focused on the long term effects of the European Central Bank's liquidity injections, as well as ongoing problems in Spain and Greece.
Hi. I'm Sayoko Murase. Welcome to the 'Weekly Market Wrap' for Thursday April 5, 2012.
The S&P 500, the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the Nasdaq were all lower for the week.
Crude oil futures are about even this week, trading around $103.32 per barrel on Friday afternoon.
Gold futures are lower this week, to $1629.98 an ounce in afternoon trading.
In notable economic news this week, the Labor Department announced that the number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits fell by 6000 last week, to a seasonally adjusted 357,000, which is the lowest level since April of 2008.
In corporate news this week, Visa (NYSE:V) announced that it is dropping Global Payments (NYSE:GPN) from its provider registry to allow time reassess the firm's data security standards following a security breach. Global Payments announced on March 30 that approximately 1.5 million credit card numbers were compromised.
Monsanto (NYSE:MON) announced that it earned $1.2 billion on revenue $4.7 billion for the quarter that ended on February 29. In the same period last year, the company earned $1 billion on revenue of $4.1 billion. The company attributed the increase to global demand for corn and strong United States sales, along with strong sales in the seeds and genomics sector.
Shares are higher in early trading.
SanDisk (NASDAQ:SNDK) announced that it expects revenue of about $1.2 billion for its fiscal first quarter, down from the previous forecast of $1.3 billion to $1.35 billion. The company also said that it expects gross margins to be in the range of 39% to 42%, also lower than its previous forecast. The company will report earnings on April 9.
CarMax (NYSE:KMX) announced that its profit in the fourth quarter increased by 7% to 41 cents per share, up from $88.8 million, or 39 cents per share in the same period a year ago. Revenue increased by 10% to $2.48 billion. Analysts had expected earnings of 40 cents per share on revenue of $2.42 billion.
This is the 'Weekly Market Wrap' for Thursday April 5, 2012. Please join us on Monday for the 'Week Ahead Market Report."
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