Gaza Conflict Lifts Oil, Weighs Down Markets

The markets opened lower as the confllict in Gaza lifted crude oil prices.  The Dow fell 26 points to 8490 while Nasdaq dropped 13 points to 1517.

On the upside

On Friday, Motley Fool named Cosan (NYSE: CZZ) as a stock on the upswing.

Bridgelux settled a patent infringement suit with Cree (Nasdaq: CREE) by agreeing to pay royalities and license fees to the LED light maker.

A Barron's article said that despite falling natural gas and oil prices, Linn Energy (Nasdaq: LINE) will continue to make its quarterly cash distributions to shareholders, which offer a yield of 20%.

On the downside

Despite the cancellation of a $17.4 billion joint venture with the Kuwaiti government, Dow Chemical's (NYSE: DOW) proposed acquisition of Rohm & Haas (NYSE: ROH) will move forward but analyst expect terms of the deal to change.

AgFeed Industries (Nasdaq: FEED) suspended its share repurchase plan and will raise $8.8 million through the sale of 5 million shares of common stock to institutional investors.

Investors locked in profits for ProLogis (NYSE: PLD), whose shares surged last week when the real estate investment trust announced intentions to sell its Chinese operations as well as its stake in Japanese property funds.

In the broad market, advancing issues barely edged out decliners by a slim margin on the NYSE while decliners outpaced advancers by nearly 3 to 2 on Nasdaq.  The Russell 2000 which tracks small cap stocks lost 3 points to 474.