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From Briefing.com: 4:25 pm : Weakness among financial stocks led to a broad-based selling effort that resulted in the stock market's worst single-session percentage decline in one month. Though stocks finished off of session lows, they still closed in weak fashion, unable to garner support and limit losses as they did in the previous session.

The downturn left the S&P 500 just below 995, which is considered a support level below the psychologically significant 1000. Many market watchers regard 990 as the next level of support, followed by 980.

Tuesday started with modest losses until sellers made a concerted move against financials. The financial sector shed 3.5% as regional banks and diversified banks fell a respective 4.2% and 5.6%. Diversified financial services firms fell 4.4%.

CIT Group (CIT 1.20, -0.28) was one of the worst performers by percent lost. The company fell sharply out of favor by delaying its quarterly filing.

All 10 major sectors in the S&P 500 finished in the red. Behind financials, energy was the next worst performing sector. It finished with a 1.7% loss, less than half the loss that hit financials. Energy was dragged lower by weakness in the broader market and 1.6% decline in crude oil prices. Oil settled at $69.45 per barrel.

Neither corporate news nor economic data had any meaningful or lasting impact on the broader market this session. Stock futures did show some knee-jerk buying before the opening bell when participants learned that second quarter productivity increased a better-than-expected 6.4%, which was the strongest increase since the third quarter of 2003, and unit labor costs during the second quarter fell 5.8%, which was sharper than expected and the steepest drop in eight years. In other economic news, wholesale inventories fell for the 10th straight month by dropping a sharper-than-expected 1.7% in June.

Tomorrow afternoon the FOMC announces its rate decision and releases its latest policy directive, which could provide a meaningful catalyst to trading. Participants will also be keeping an eye on the results of tomorrow's 10-year Treasury Note auction, which carries significantly more importance than today's $37 billion auction of 3-year Treasuries. Today's auction drew a yield of 1.78% and carried a bid-to-cover ratio of nearly 2.9, which is above recent averages.

Treasuries made a bit of a pullback in the wake of the announcement, but recovered into the close. In turn, the benchmark 10-year Note gained 27 ticks, which sent its yield well below 3.7%. The yield on the 10-year Note has shed more than 10 basis points so far this week.DJ30 -96.50 NASDAQ -22.51 NQ100 -1.0% R2K -1.7% SP400 -1.4% SP500 -12.75 NASDAQ Adv/Vol/Dec 719/1.94 bln/1931 NYSE Adv/Vol/Dec 788/1.20 bln/2235

Applied Materials beats by $0.08, beats on revs
4:05 PM ET 8/11/09 | Briefing.com

Reports Q3 (Jul) net of breakeven, $0.08 better than the First Call consensus of ($0.08); revenues fell 38.7% year/year to $1.13 bln vs the $958.4 mln consensus.

Co reports Q3 gross margin of 28.7% vs 22.4% consensus. Co reports New orders for the quarter totaled $1.07 billion.

Regional distribution was: Southeast Asia and China 25 percent, Taiwan 24 percent, Japan 14 percent, North America 14 percent, Europe 12 percent, and Korea 11 percent. Within the Silicon Systems Group (SSG), new order composition was: foundry 42 percent, DRAM 25 percent, logic and other 18 percent, and flash 15 percent.

Backlog for the company as of the end of the quarter was $2.95 billion, down from $3.16 billion in the previous quarter.

9:46 AM Microsoft slips below its 50-day simple moving average for the first time since March (MSFT) 23.24 -0.18 : Note that it's 50-day ema lies below at 23.03.

9:46AM Corning Shizuoka glass production disrupted (GLW) 15.99 -0.40 : Co announces production at its LCD glass manufacturing facility in Shizuoka, Japan was disrupted by the earthquake that occurred in Honshu yesterday. "We are relieved that initial reports indicate no Corning employees were injured," James B. Flaws, vice chairman and chief financial officer, said. "However, our glass-making operations at the facility are currently suspended and we believe they will remain so for some time. We are assessing options to meet customer demand and accelerating the restart of idled glass melting tanks at other facilities. It is clear that glass volume at our wholly owned business will be lower than originally planned for the third quarter. At the present time it does not appear that this outage will have a material impact on our fourth-quarter shipments based on our current view of the market. We will update investors on any significant changes to this outlook." "Our adjusted estimate now places sequential volume at our wholly owned business to be down between 5% and 10% in the third quarter, versus our original expectation of flat to up slightly, following a particularly strong second-quarter performance," Flaws added. Corning did not provide specific sales guidance for the third quarter, but the company did note that the lower glass volume would have a negative impact on sales by approximately $65 million.