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From Briefing.com: 4:30 pm : Solid gains overseas and a smaller-than-expected weekly jobless claims count helped stocks start the session on a strong note, but sellers applied pressure in early afternoon action. Near-term technical support provided a springboard so stocks could reclaim some of their gains, but the rebound faded into the close.

Initial strength stemmed from strong gains overseas, excluding the Shanghai Composite (-1.4%). Japan's Nikkei advanced 0.8% and Hong Kong's Hang Seng climbed 0.4%, while Germany's DAX advanced 0.9%, France's CAC climbed 1.2%, and Britain's FTSE finished with a 1.2% gain. Little was made of news that the Bank of England kept its target interest rate at 0.5%, as expected, but news that the trade deficit for the United Kingdom grew to record levels in July put pressure on the British pound. The pound pared its loss to finish just 0.2% below the greenback, though.

Initial jobless claims for the week ended September 4 totaled 451,000, which is down 27,000 week-over-week and less than the 470,000 claims that had been expected, on average, among economists polled by Briefing.com. Continuing claims came in at 4.48 million, but that was a greater tally than the 4.45 million that had been widely expected. Continuing claims were essentially unchanged week-over-week.

As for other data, the U.S. trade deficit for July improved to $42.8 billion from $49.8 billion. It was widely expected to come in at $47.3 billion.

The generally positive data and the strength of overseas markets motivated morning participants to send stocks to a gain of little more than 1%, but the S&P 500 was unable to push past the 1110 line.

Stocks spent a couple of hours drifting along session highs, before news that Deutsche Bank (DB 59.99, -1.97) may issue stock to raise capital induced selling. The S&P 500 saw its gain more than halved, but near-term support at the 1102 line kept the stock market from extending its slide. Support there helped stocks rebound, but the bounce lost momentum shortly ahead of the close.

Though the Deustche Bank headline should not come as a surprise, given lingering concerns about the health of European banks and that new regulatory requirements are expected with the release of Basel III, it was enough to cut into the financial sector. Financial stocks saw a 2% gain more than halved before they settled with a 1.2% gain.

Part of the sector's resilience is owed to positive momentum among domestic bank stocks. Their strength in recent sessions has the KBW Bank Index up about 9% since setting a 2010 intraday low just seven sessions ago.

In contrast to continued gains among bank stocks, the winning streak among steel stocks was snapped with a 1.6% loss. Prior to this session's slide, steel stocks in the S&P 500 had climbed in six straight sessions for a cumulative gain of nearly 12%. Weakness among steel stocks this session undercut the materials sector, which finished with a 0.3% loss. It was the only major sector that failed to stage a gain.

Though the broader market lost some of its direction into the close, it still held on for its sixth gain in seven sessions. Participation in that time has been paltry, however. In fact, trading volume on the NYSE has failed to break 1 billion shares in each of the past five sessions.

Strength among stocks continues to weigh on Treasuries. Lackluster results from an auction of 30-year Bonds could not change that. The auction drew a bid-to-cover of 2.7 and dollar demand of $35.5 billion. The indirect bidder participation rate was 36.1%. An average of the past six auctions produced a bid-to-cover of 2.8, dollar demand of $39.0 billion, and indirect bidder participation of 35.4%.

Advancing Sectors: Financials (+1.2%), Telecom (+1.2%), Health Care (+1.2%), Utilities (+0.7%), Consumer Staples (+0.3%), Tech (+0.2%), Energy (+0.2%), Industrials (+0.1%), Consumer Discretionary (+0.1%)
Declining Sectors: Materials (-0.3%)DJ30 +28.23 NASDAQ +7.33 NQ100 +0.3% R2K +0.1% SP400 +0.2% SP500 +5.31 NASDAQ Adv/Vol/Dec 1385/1.17 bln/1182 NYSE Adv/Vol/Dec 1862/837 mln/1133

4:30PM Texas Instruments narrows Q3 EPS to the range of $0.66-0.72 vs. $0.69 Thomson Reuters consensus, narrows revenues to the range of $3.62-3.78 bln vs. $3.69 bln consensus (TXN) 23.84 +0.16 : Original outlook for Q3 was EPS in the range of $0.64-0.74 and revenues between $3.55-3.85 bln. Thomson Reuters consensus EPS $0.69 and revenues $3.689 bln.

4:03PM National Semi beats by $0.02, reports revs in-line; guides Q2 revs below consensus (NSM) 12.90 +0.01 : Reports Q1 (Aug) earnings of $0.36 per share, $0.02 better than the Thomson Reuters consensus of $0.34; revenues rose 31.0% year/year to $412 mln vs the $415.4 mln consensus. Co issues downside guidance for Q2, sees Q2 revs of $390-415 mln vs. $420.62 mln Thomson Reuters consensus. Q1 sales increased sequentially due primarily to demand from wireless handset and industrial markets, the two largest markets served by National. Q1 gross margin of 70.9 percent set a new record for the co, driven by improved manufacturing cost efficiencies from higher capacity utilization and benefits from manufacturing consolidation completed in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2010. "Our business model is working well with another quarter of revenue growth, 70 percent gross margins and over 36 percent operating margins. However, in the near term, slower growth in our end markets and distribution channel, along with some likely inventory reduction, will mute the seasonal growth that we would normally see in our business during this time of the year."

4:00PM Lattice Semi reiterates guidance for Q3; Q3 revenue is expected to be flat to up 5% on a sequential basis vs consensus of growth of 3% (LSCC) 4.66 -0.06 : Gross margin percentage is expected to be ~59-61% of revenue. Total operating expenses are expected to be approximately $31.0 million.

8:00AM ARM Holdings introduced the Cortex-A15 MPCore processor (ARMH) 18.09 : Co introduced the Cortex-A15 MPCore processor that delivers a 5x performance improvement over advanced smartphone processors, within a comparable energy footprint. In advanced infrastructure applications the Cortex-A15 processor running at up to 2.5GHz will enable scalable solutions within constantly shrinking energy, thermal and cost budgets.