Market Wrap for Tuesday: Apple Breaks Below $500, Dell Continues to Rally

Market indices were mixed on Tuesday. The S&P 500 slowly melted up throughout the day, trading roughly flat into the close. The Dow Jones was once down 61 points, but also moved higher during the session, trading into positive territory late in the afternoon. The Nasdaq was in the red for most of the day, weighed down by Apple APPL. Apple The Cupertino, California tech giant continued to trade lower on Tuesday, breaking below $500. At one point, the stock was down over three percent trading below $485. There was no fundamental news to support the move lower, although Nomura lowered its price target on the stock. Continued speculation remains that iPhone sales could be weaker than expected. The company will report earnings next week. Dell DELL Shares of Dell continued to move strongly higher on Tuesday. Bloomberg first reported that the company was in talks to go private on Monday; that report was backed up on Tuesday by Reuters who said that Silver Lake Partners was leading the deal. Facebook FB Facebook held a special event on Tuesday. The company unveiled its latest product initiative, social search. Facebook's search feature will allow users to look for things like “Indian restaurants my friends like” and receive instant answers. Facebook has also partnered with Microsoft MSFT on its search initiative: If users' queries cannot be answered by searching their social network, it will be turned over to Microsoft's Bing for a broader web query. The announcement did little good for any stocks, including Facebook itself, which dropped about 2 percent on the announcement. Yelp YELP was also hit, dropping as much as 7 percent. Google GOOG saw a pop at the beginning of the Facebook event, but traded back to near unchanged by the end of it. Express EXPR Express rallied roughly 24 percent on Tuesday, after the company raised its guidance Monday night. Express said it now anticipates fourth quarter earnings of $0.72-0.74 per share, more than the $0.62-0.68 the company had previously forecast US Economic Data U.S. retail sales came in better than expected, up 0.5 percent on a monthly basis -- more than the 0.2 percent economists had been anticipating. The producer price index was generally lower than expected. The PPI on a monthly basis dropped 0.2 percent (the consensus estimate was a drop of 0.1 percent). Core PPI increased 2 percent on a yearly basis, slightly less than the 2.1 percent economists were expecting.