Market News Morning: Dick’s (NYSE:DIC), Wal-Mart (NYSE:WMT), McDonalds (NYSE:MCD), Bank of America (NYSE:BAC)

Futures started low for the Dow, but the market seems to have rallied early this morning.  The Dow and NASDAQ are up moderately at the time of this writing, but S&P is down slightly.  Today could be an interesting day out there.  Lets check out some company news:

In retail news, Dick’s Sporting Goods (NYSE:DIC) has released their 4Q, reaping 56 cents per share of profits.  This positive gain is an 11% increase in revenue, and is 2 cents over what the sporting goods supplier projected its gains at.  Wal-Mart (NYSE:WMT) is planning on bringing back some items it stopped selling at its stores after noticing that customer traffic decreased slightly in January.  In 2009, the big-box goliath had reduced the number of SKU (Or in other words, the variety of merchandise) at their stores.  This reversal in strategy is coming after a losing quarter of 1.6% for the large retailer.

In non-durable goods, McDonalds Restaurant (NYSE:MCD) reported yesterday that sales in February were up approximately 6.4%, with its strongest performances coming from it’s breakfast offerings and it’s recent Chicken McNuggets promotion centered around the Winter Olympics. Most of this increase happened overseas. Burger King (NYSE:BKC) lost sales during the fourth quarter, as the North American North-East was socked by massive snowfalls.  The burger joint has 75% of it’s restaurants in this area, and is blaming the weather on it’s sales decline.  They lost 8.2% of sales in this region during the last two months.

In banking news, Citigroup, Inc (NYSE:C) put out a press release today saying that they’ll release their first quarter profits on April 18^th.  Bank of America (NYSE:BAC) will be launching five-year notes worth $2.5 billion today. It’s expected that these notes will produce 215 basis points more than US Treasuries.  – Reuters

That’s all for right now.  Good luck in your investing day, we’ll have more as the markets close.