Stocks Advance; MBIA, RIMM Jump

Stocks started the week off higher, led by financials and technology stocks.

The price of crude swung wildly between $123 and $126 a barrel after jumping $10 a barrel last week, ending Friday just shy of $126 a barrel; the dollar relinquished gains against the euro.

Keeping a lid on the dollar's gains were comments from Chicago Federal Reserve Bank President Charles Evans, in response to a question about when the Fed would start raising rates again. "There continue to be downside risks to economic growth," Evans told reporters after a speech at a college in Illinois. "We're still muddling through this." That seemed to contradict comments during the speech that monetary policy was "accommodative" and "appropriate" and that U.S. growth should improve in the second half. Evans isn't currently a voting member of the Fed's Open Market Committee.

"There's no reason to chase stocks up here," said Dave Rovelli, managing director of equity trading at Canaccord Adams, citing the market's 11-percent gain over the past 7-8 weeks and $125-a-barrel oil. But, when it's time to go back in -- which Rovelli pegs around 1370 in the S&P -- he recommends large-cap techs.

"Companies with a certain niche like RIMM, Apple or Google," Rovelli said, "that are outperforming everybody -- delivering products people really want," Rovelli said.

Global Showdown

Technology stocks were among the day's big gainers as traders cheered the next wave of cool gadgets. The tech-heavy Nasdaq outperformed both the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500 index.

American depositary shares of Research In Motion jumped as the Canadian company's new BlackBerry received rave reviews. The device, known as the BlackBerry Bold, is the first 3G BlackBerry, which means global roaming, has features that make it easier to browse the Internet and download music, and has added processing power to better handle business applications.

The BlackBerry Bold is expected to debut this summer in Europe, when Apple's first 3G iPhone is set to launch.

Shares of AT&T , which has exclusive U.S. carrier rights on the BlackBerry Bold, ticked higher.

Sprint Nextel reported a wider quarterly loss as it lost high-value customers who pay monthly phone bills and commit to contracts of at least a year. The No. 3 U.S. mobile-service posted a loss of $505 million, or 18 cents a share, compared with a loss of $211 million, or 7 cents a share, a year earlier. Wall Street was expecting Sprint to turn a small profit of 2 cents per share.

The financial sector gained more than 1 percent, as results from HSBC , Europe's biggest bank, eased concerns about the banking sector. HSBC reported its profit rose as growth in Asia and elsewhere helped counter another big hit for bad debts on U.S. home loans. The company took a bad debt charge of $3.2 billion during the quarter for its U.S. consumer finance business and wrote down almost as much for a deterioration in the value of risky assets amid the credit crunch.

Hard-hit bond insurer MBIA reported a stunning quarterly loss of $2.41 billion, or $13.03 a share, well above the 19 cents a share analysts had expected. The company attributed its poor performance to unrealized losses on insured derivatives.

MBIA shares bounced higher in what traders said was most likely short-covering. The same thing happened to Fannie Mae , though the proof was in the next day's pudding, when the stock resumed its decline. Stay tuned.

Traders may also have been cheered by comments from MBIA's CEO, who said the company's balance sheet is set up to withstand credit stress levels many multiples of what we are experiencing now. The insurer also said quarterly revenue dropped less than it had initially reported.

Shares of rival Ambac also advanced.

Morgan Stanley said it has raised a $4 billion infrastructure fund, exceeding its target, and is targeting investments in sectors like transportation, energy and utilities. The fund shot past its original target of $2.5 billion.

In deal news, Cablevision agreed to buy Long Island newspaper Newsday from Tribune for $650 million;  News Corp.