Retail Sales Disappoint

By: MarketMinute.com Market Updates

Disappointing retail sales continued to weigh on investors even as 30-year mortgage rates fell to a record 4.71%. The markets traded near the flatline during the midday with the Dow adding 3 points to 10,456 while Nasdaq gained 7 points to 2192.

On the upside

Plastic compound and resin maker A. Schulman will pay $191.4 million in cash and stock to acquire specialty resin and concentrates maker ICO (Nasdaq: ICOC).

The Office of the Commissioner of Insurance for the State of Wisconsin temporarily waived minimum capital requirements for MGIC (NYSE: MTG) until December 31, 2011.

Advanced Micro Devices (NYSE: AMD) teamed with SiSoftware to jointly develop SiSoftware's OpenCL GPGPU benchmark suite.