TECH STOCKS: Almost Breaking Even

Can stocks broadly continue their year-over-year earnings growth for the rest of 2004? Maybe not, and that's one of the factors that pundits cited for Wednesday's small pullback by all of our indexes. A reversal of any size, however, is significant after Tuesday's healthy rise.

Technology shares held up the best. The Nasdaq-100 tracking stock, which we use to better gauge how individual tech shares performed, actually rose 0.3%, or 11 cents, to $37.55 on moderate trading of 68 million shares.

Our InformationWeek 100 index fell but 0.14%, or less than half a point, to 338.74. The Nasdaq Composite index fell 0.19%, or 3.88 points, to rest at 2,076.47. It was a day of little movement for the Nasdaq, and it had been on the way up when the bell rang.

The S&P 500 fell 0.45%, or 5.17 points, to 1,151.82, and the Dow held its loss to 0.4%, or 42.89, to rest at 10,671.99.