Daily Wrap

DJIA -36.86 (-0.24%) to 15,521.97;S&P 500 -6.32 (-0.37%) to 1,685.33;NASDAQ -14.02 (-0.39%) to 3,599.14

Today the S&P 500 started with a small gap down that initially tried to rally back to Friday’s close but couldn’t hold and slipped lower until finding a bottom just before noon EST.  After gaining some traction the S&P rallied until roughly 2:30 EST before falling again in the last hour of trading but did not make new lows for the day.

There was a notable merger in today’s news and while the stocks didn’t move very much, due to the size of the companies it was note worthy as Publicis (PUBGY) and Omnicom (OMC) in the advertising space agreed to merge.  Also making news in the merger space, Saks (SKS) agreed to sell itself to Hudson’s Bay for $16 per share.

Another hot name in today’s trading was CF Industries (CF) which closed up over 11% after activist investor Dan Loeb announced in an investor letter that he has taken a position in the company and believe the company should be paying a much larger dividend.  CF is one to watch for a consolidation and trade.

The following noteworthy companies are scheduled to report earnings before tomorrow’s open:  PFE, MRK, OXY, NEE, GLW, CMI, AET, WM, COH, X, JBLU

In analyst notes today, D.R. Horton (DHI) was upgraded to Buy at CRT Capital with a $26 price target while Quality Systems (QSII) was upgraded to Buy at Sterne Agee with a $28 price target and BNY Mellon (BK) was upgraded to Buy at Guggenheim.  On the downside Expedia (EXPE) was downgraded to Neutral at Lazard Capital, Microsoft (MSFT) was downgraded to Neutral at Atlantic Equities and Whole Foods (WFM) downgraded to Hold at Cantor with a $54 price target.