Some Islands of Calm In a Stormy Market

Enough doom and gloom. Sure, stock indexes around the world are in free fall as gigantic government bailouts fail to thaw the credit markets or revive consumer demand.

But indexes don't measure everything. Some individual stocks did just fine today, thank you very much.

Look first at the Dow Jones industrial average. Er, let's not. All 30 companies listed are down on the day.

Okay, how about the Standard & Poor's 500? Bigger pool to fish in there. Sure enough, if you ignore the wreckage of National City Corp. (down 27 percent on the day), General Growth Properties (down 20 percent), and Nvidia Corp. (also down 22 percent), there are some winners.

Hartford Financial rose 12.8 percent on the day, although truth be told that followed a $2.5 billion capital injection from Allianz to bolster Hartford's battered balance sheet. The stock is still down two-thirds this year.

How about the CME Group, then? It climbed 11.5 percent on the day, on investors' expectations that it will benefit as over-the-counter financial instruments blamed for the crisis are forced to move onto an exchange for increased transparency. That's making lemonade from lemons.

But the prize of the day goes to Monster Worldwide, the online job-hunting service. It rose more than 6 percent in the green today.

With the wheels falling off the economy, a wave of layoffs looks to become a tsunami soon enough. Lots of people will be looking for jobs, even if there are none to be found. Monster, indeed.

by Mark Stein

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