The markets rallied in late afternoon trading to close sharply higher with the Dow soaring 153 points to 10,809 after Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke indicated that the Fed may consider additional stimulus funds. Nasdaq leaped 68 points to 2404.
On the upside
Shares of Focus Media Holding (Nasdaq: FMCN) continued climbing after raising its stock repurchase plan to $650 million.
Wave Systems (Nasdaq: WAVX) will present at the IT security trade fair it-sa in Europe.
Motley Fool wrote that Nvidia's (Nasdaq: NVDA) transition to providing chips for mobile computing platforms will improve profitability.
On the downside
The federal government proposed new regulations that may lower the amount of prescription drugs given to the elderly. Shares of pharmacy services firms Omnicare (NYSE: OCR) and PharMerica (NYSE: PMC) dropped.
InterOil (NYSE: IOC) retained the services of Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS) and UBS (NYSE: UBS) to secure a partner to develop the LNG project in Papua New Guinea.
Windstream (Nasdaq: WIN) launched its second generation cloud platform but the stock price slipped.
In the broad market, advancing issues outpaced decliners by a margin of more than 4 to 3 on the NYSE and by more than 5 to 2 on Nasdaq. The Russell 2000 which tracks small cap stocks surged 39 points to 648.
