Benzinga Mid-Afternoon Market Update

Towards the end of trading Monday, the Dow traded up 0.66 percent to 13,416.40 while the NASDAQ rose 0.52 percent to 3,059.87. The S&P also rose, increasing 0.67 percent to 1,438.16. As a heads up for this week, pharmaceutical stocks are set to be even more volatile than normal leading up to an FDA panel meeting on drugs from three pharmaceutical companies: NPS Pharmaceuticals

, Aegerion Pharmaceuticals

, and Isis Pharmaceuticals

Clearwire

consolidated its gains from earlier in the morning, remaining up 13.79 percent at $2.64, while trading on a massive 150 million share volume. The spike started when an offer from Softbank to buy a 70 percent stake in Sprint

became official this morning. Word that Sprint is still attempting to acquire the company have prompted traders to pour more money into the stock. Shares of Workday

also continued their rally late in the day, trading up 8.71 percent to $52.93, riding the enthusiasm from its successful IPO on Friday. Alpha Natural Resources

enjoyed a boost late in trading Monday, increasing 7.11 percent to $8.44 after an endorsement of the company from Jeff Killburg on CNBC this afternoon.

Illumina

traded down 6.25 percent to $47.96 on unusually high trade volume, but without any significant public news. Sonic Automotive

traded down as well, decreasing 8.27 percent to $17.85 Shares of Pandora

also took a hit, falling 3.46 percent to $9.07 after Microsoft

announced it would be making a music storage and streaming service available with its X-box live product.

In commodity news, Oil traded down 0.02 percent to $91.83, while Gold traded down 1.19 percent to $1,738.70. Silver continued to trade down 0.94percent Monday afternoon to $32.73.

The Euro zone was fairly quiet Monday morning, besides the news of Scotland's push to break away from the United Kingdom. In an update to the story, Reuters reported that a majority of Scots opposed the breakaway, and that the vote would occur at the end of 2014.

There were a couple economic releases monday morning, the first being advanced retail sales, which came in at 1.1 percent, above the expected 0.8 percent, but slightly below the prior figure of 1.2 percent. Retail sales less autos came in at 1.1 percent as well, above the expected 0.6 percent, and slightly higher than the previously reported number 1 percent. Retail sales ex auto & gas came in at 0.9 percent, above the expected 0.4 percent, and significantly higher than the prior figure of 0.3 percent. Finally, the New York empire state manufacturing index came in at -6.16, below the expected -4, but slightly higher than the previous number of -10.41.