Stock Market Today - DOW Falls 50 Points
Stocks were flat most of the day today but then fell 50 points in the last hour as people decided to lighten up before the Easter holidays and following uninspiring reports about the health of the labor market and regional manufacturing.
Sentiment on Wall Street took a wgack on the head from the Chicago Purchasing Managers Index, which showed U.S. Midwest business activity down to 58.8 in March -- below forecasts.
The ADP jobs report was also not positive with 23,000 jobs being shed this month, instead of the extra 40,000 jobs expected.
"The ADP number was a disappointment, but some investors are thinking that it may not directly reflect what could happen on Friday," said Terry Morris from the National Penn Investors Trust.
The Dow fell 50 points to 10,856. The S&P 500 fell 3.8 to 1,169. The Nasdaq Composite rose 12.7 to 2,397.
Friday's payrolls report may not be as bad as the ADP report, which may explain why the markets were not worse.
The S&P 500 has risen 73% since March 2009 and is up 4 quarters in a row.
Over in London the FTSE rose 7 as nobody had told them the DOW was heading down.
At the same time the FSA in London has finally woken up from its long and peaceful slumber and brought charges against 7 people for conspiring to participate in a £2.5m insider trading ring making use of information they obtained from the confidential printing offices at UBS and JPMorgan Cazenove, one of the defendants has also been charged with money laundering. The FSA named the seven charged as Ali Mustafa, Paresh Shah, Pardip Saini, Bijal Shah, Neten Shah, Truptesh Patel and Mitesh Shah.
It said the charges followed searches and arrests of eight suspects back in July 2008, and are unrelated to its more recent anti-corruption operations.
The FSA also revealed that a warrant has been issued for an 8th man. It turns out that all eight had been arrested and released already in July 2008.
The men have been charged with participating in a conspiracy that included trading on inside information in around twelve transactions, including Thomson’s 2007 takeover of Reuters.
This is the largest criminal insider trading case brought by the FSA to date, although there is another recent case said to involve City that is potentially much larger, in which seven men were arrested last week in what is described by the FSA as a “sophisticated and long-running insider dealing ring” centering on interlinked chains of individuals allegedly dealing in the shares of companies including Scottish & Newcastle between 2007 and 2009. Three financial institutions are known to have employees caught up in the operation: hedge fund Moore Capital, Deutsche Bank and Exane BNP, 50% owned by BNP Paribas.
No one has been charged in the most recent case and all of the men are said to have denied any wrongdoing. They have been released on bail.
These cases are designed to show that the FSA has finally decided to get tough on insider trading.
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