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Americans spent briskly during the early spring months in the latest sign that they’re encouraged by the economic recovery. Falling gas prices, a rallying stock market and gains in the job market all fueled Americans’ shopping habits even as cold weather tempered their desire to buy spring fashions.

A big gain in the job market is lifting the stock market to new milestones. The Dow Jones industrial average crossed 15,000 for the first time early Friday, and the Standard and Poor's 500 index, a broader market measure, broke through 1,600 for the first time.

A legal challenge to an ambitious plan to let the public buy shares in one of New York City's most famous landmarks — the Empire State Building — was cast aside on Tuesday in a ruling by a Manhattan judge.

As the search volume on generic terms such as "debt", "portfolio" and "stocks" fell, the Dow Jones average tended to go up - and vice versa. An investment strategy based on these search volume data between 2004 and 2011 would have made a profit of 326%.

For a few surreal minutes, a mere 12 words on Twitter caused the world's mightiest stock market to tremble. No sooner did hackers send a false Associated Press tweet reporting explosions at the White House on Tuesday than investors started dumping stocks - eventually unloading $134 billion worth. Turns out, some investors are not only gullible, they're impossibly fast stock traders.

Gold prices pushed higher as investors bet that demand for the metal in coins and bars would continue at a high rate following this month's plunge in prices.

A rare earnings miss for IBM tugged the Dow Jones industrial average lower on Friday, while the rest of the market headed toward slight gains after a turbulent week. Quarterly earnings for the country's largest provider of computer services fell short of forecasts for the first time since 2005.Read more on NewsOK.com

SeaWorld Entertainment Inc.'s stock surged in its first day of trading on the New York Stock Exchange. The owner of theme parks famous for water shows featuring killer whales and dolphins jumped $5.29, or 19.6 percent, to $32.29 in afternoon trading, after the company and its backers raised $702 million.

As I write this post on April 15, spot gold prices, according to Bloomberg, settled down approximately 9% for the day (which marks the biggest one day decline since February of 1983), while spot silver prices were down approximately 12% for the day.

China's campaign to cut a huge backlog of initial public offerings has failed to deliver. Now there are signs that the authorities could be preparing to reopen the IPO floodgates.