January 6, 2014: Markets opened slightly higher on Monday but had difficulty holding on to the opening gains. The DJIA closed up%, the S&P 500 closed down 0.03%, and the Nasdaq Composite closed down 0.27%.

The big move from among DJIA stocks today was made by Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) which dropped more than 2%. It was a good news, bad news day for the company. Microsoft said it sold more than 3 million Xbox One game controllers in 2013 after the product’s launch on November 22nd. The bad news is a report that Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) will replace Microsoft as the cloud services provide for the city of Boston. Shares of Microsoft closed down 2.11% at $36.13 in a 52-week range of $26.28 to $38.98. Share volume was a relatively light 34 million against a daily average of more than 40 million.

E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Co. (NYSE: DD), opened at about 0.2% lower Monday morning and closed down 1.27% at $62.97. The stock’s 52-week range is $45.41 to $65.00, and the high was set on just last week. Volume was about 18% below the daily average of around 3.9 million shares traded.

Sirius XM Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ: SIRI) helped keep the Nasdaq 100 from tanking today. Shares opened more than 7% higher following the weekend’s proposed offer from Liberty Media Corp. (NASDAQ: LMCA) to buy the remaining 42% of the company’s stock that it doesn’t already own. Maybe Sirius shareholders think they can force Liberty to bid against itself. We wish them good luck with that. Shares closed up 7.28% at $3.83 in a 52-week range of $2.95 to $4.18. Volume was nearly 8 times the daily average of 51 million shares traded.

Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) recouped some of Friday’s loss and helped keep the Nasdaq Composite’s losses in check. The stock opened down about 0.6% but kept moving higher throughout the day to finish at $543.93, a gain of 0.55% in a 52-week range of $385.10 to $575.14. Trading volume was nearly 30% higher than the daily average of around 11 million.

Of the Dow 30 stocks only 11 closed higher today while 19 closed lower.

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