Stocks | featured news

LinkedIn's surging share price cooled Friday as the social network projected slower revenue growth next quarter following a decision to lower the number of display ads that the website shows.

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.

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.

Apple is opening the doors to its bank vault, saying it will distribute $100 billion in cash to its shareholders by the end of 2015. At the same time, the company said revenue for the current quarter could fall from the year before, which would be the first decline in many years.

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

Shares of Apple Inc. hit their lowest levels in a year and half on Wednesday, after a supplier hinted at a slowdown in iPhone and iPad production. The stock was down $20.37, or 4.8 percent, at $405.87. Apple's shares hit $403.67 earlier, the lowest level since Dec. 2011. The decline means Apple has _for now_ lost its position as the world's most valuable publicly traded company to Exxon Mobil Corp.

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.

Trading in the stock market turned more treacherous in late-day trading as investors reacted to slowing economic growth in China and a massive commodity sell-off -- and as initial word spread as well of the explosions at the end of the Boston Marathon. The Dow Jones industrial average lost 266 points on the day, down 1.8%. It was the Dow's biggest point drop since Nov. 7, in the wake of President Obama's reelection, when the index lost 295 points.