Flat Open As Investors Monitor European Debt Crisis

The markets opened flat with the Dow easing a point to 12,504 while Nasdaq lost 6 points to 2795 as investors continued to monitor the debt crisis in Europe.

On the upside

NCR (NYSE: NCR) offered a premium of $1.2 billion in cash to acquire Radiant Systems (Nasdaq: RADS).

Chesapeake Energy (NYSE: CHK) will invest $150 million to help Clean Energy Fuels (Nasdaq: CLNE) build 150 liquefied natural gas fueling stations.

MBIA (NYSE: MBI) will drop its lawsuit alleging that Bank of America's (NYSE: BAC) Merrill Lynch unit engaged in fraud.

On the downside

Microchip Technology (Nasdaq: MCHP) blamed a drop in demand for cutting its first quarter guidance and warned of sequentially lower results for the second quarter.

JMP Securities downgraded Advanced Micro Devices (Nasdaq: AMD) yesterday to a Market Underperform rating.

UBS analyst Parag Agarwal downgraded ON Semiconductor (Nasdaq: ONNN) to a Neutral rating.

In the broad market, advancing issues were on par with decliners on the NYSE while decliners edged out advancers by a margin of 10 to 9 on Nasdaq. The Russell 2000 which tracks small cap stocks held steady at 833.