TECH STOCKS: Flat Tuesday

Markets started the day wanting to push solidly forward following Monday's retreat, but bad news around the world made for tumultuous trading Tuesday. In the end, each of our indexes ended slightly lower. The U.S. Department of Agriculture suspended all beef imports from Canada following reports of mad cow disease in that country. Then the federal government raised the national threat level from "elevated" to "high."

Still and all, our InformationWeek 100 remained relatively flat. It fell 0.74 points, or 0.3%, to 223.15. The Nasdaq and the S&P 500 both fell 0.1%. For the Nasdaq index, that meant 1.68 points, to 1,491.09, and for the S&P, it was 1.04 points, to 919.73. The Nasdaq-100 (QQQ) actually closed up 0.08 points, or 0.3%, to $27.77. Almost 70 million shares of the stock were traded. The Dow Jones fell 0.02%, or 2.03 points, to 8,491.36.