Hijjah 06, 1431, Nov 12, 2010, SPA -- Stocks fell at the opening on Thursday and struggled to recover after a disappointing outlook from Cisco Systems dragged down the technology sector. Investors also are uneasy ahead of the gathering of the world's biggest industrial and emerging economies in Seoul, South Korea, where investors hope the Group of Twenty (G20) summit will conclude with a clear, detailed direction about where the world economy is headed. There were no U.S. government economic reports released Thursday in observance of Veterans Day. The U.S. dollar gained versus the euro and the yen. Light sweet crude oil for December delivery was flat at $87.81 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Gold futures rose $7.60 to $1,406.90 an ounce. The Dow Jones industrial average fell 73.94, or 0.65 percent, to 11,283.10. Shares of Cisco fell more than 16 percent after its disappointing earnings report; it was the company's biggest one-day drop since mid-1994. The company's pessimistic outlook hurt other technology companies, including Hewlett-Packard, whose shares fell 2.5 percent, and Microsoft, whose stock lost 1 percent. The broader Standard & Poor's 500 index fell 5.17, or 0.4 percent, to 1,213.54. The technology-heavy Nasdaq composite index fell 23.26, or 0.9 percent, to 2,555.52.
