Profit taking drags Wall St lower; GTAT crashes

By Rodrigo Campos

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. stocks were falling on Monday with a slide in Micron shares offsetting gains in Hewlett-Packard and traders cashing in on last Friday's sharp move higher.

Micron was falling 5.6 percent to $32.04 as the largest percentage decliner on the S&P 500 tech sector after Samsung unveiled plans to spend $14.7 billion on a new chip facility.

Hewlett-Packard was posting the sector's largest gains, up 5.2 percent to $37.02 after it said it would split into two listed companies and eliminate another 5,000 jobs.

"Friday's move was pretty big, and despite the good Hewlett Packard news and other (merger) activity there's nervousness in general," said Rick Meckler, president of LibertyView Capital Management in Jersey City, New Jersey.

"Before earnings there's a lot of short-term trading going on and we have increased volatility," he said.

The Dow Jones industrial average was falling 65.88 points, or 0.39 percent, to 16,943.81, the S&P 500 was losing 8.33 points, or 0.42 percent, to 1,959.57 and the Nasdaq Composite was dropping 27.29 points, or 0.61 percent, to 4,448.33.

The S&P 500 posted its largest daily advance in nearly two months on Friday but finished the week in the red.

The largest percentage gainer on the New York Stock Exchange was CareFusion, rising 22.94 percent after medical equipment supplier Becton Dickinson agreed to buy it for $12.2 billion in cash and stock.

On the Nasdaq, the largest gainer was also related to an acquisition, with Durata Therapeutics rising 72.2 percent.

GT Advanced Technologies, down 87.3 percent to $1.40, was the most active stock on the Nasdaq after Apple Inc's partner in a sapphire glass plant in Arizona said it had filed for voluntary bankruptcy protection.

Declining issues were outnumbering advancing ones on the NYSE by 1,625 to 1,402, for a 1.16-to-1 ratio on the downside; on the Nasdaq, 1,749 issues were falling and 846 advancing for a 2.07-to-1 ratio favoring decliners.

The benchmark S&P 500 index was posting 15 new 52-week highs and 5 new lows; the Nasdaq Composite was recording 21 new highs and 91 new lows.

(Reporting by Rodrigo Campos; Editing by Nick Zieminski)