The stock market ended a losing week with light selling as investors grew uneasy about a rising dollar and spiking demand for the safest government debt. After two strong weeks, investors tried unsuccessfully to extend the market's rally after major stock indexes closed at 13-month highs on Tuesday. Disappointing reports on housing and worries about flagging demand at technology companies sapped strength from the market's eight-month rally.

Stocks fell for the third straight day Friday as a disappointing earnings report from computer maker Dell (DELL) weighed on technology shares. The Nasdaq composite index, with a big representation of tech stocks, logged the weakest performance of the major indexes for the week.

Cash-strapped consumers are eating more meals at home and that's slathering J.M. Smucker's (SJM) bottom line in sweet, sticky profits.

The packaged-food maker said Friday that fiscal second-quarter earnings boomed more than 170%, blowing past Wall Street's estimates by 18 cents a share, according to Thomson Reuters. Even more impressive, revenue leaped by 52%.

Smucker may be best known for its eponymous jams and jellies -- other brands include Jif, Hungry Jack, Crisco and Pillsbury -- but it's the Folgers coffee business the company acquired from Procter & Gamble (PG) last year that's jolting growth.

Several years ago, when I was doing research for hedge funds, I spent a month talking to Autodesk (ADSK) resellers. Autodesk's AutoCAD software suite is the standard tool used by designers and architects in the construction trade, and it dominates its market much like Adobe's Creative Suite dominates the print, graphic and interactive design fields. Its resellers are the hundreds of consulting organizations and systems integrators that sell Autodesk licenses to customers in the construction business. Like many big software companies, Autodesk relies on a huge reseller channel for the majority of its sales volume.

What my favorite resellers all told me was that they like to play construction-related stocks based on what they see happening at Autodesk, which serves all segments of the construction trade including building, civil engineering, office building design, and factory design.

The combined mortgage delinquency and foreclosure rates hit 14.41% on a non-seasonally adjusted basis -- the highest ever on record, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association's National Delinquency Survey released Thursday.

The MBA reported that in the third quarter of 2009, loans 90 days or more past due, loans in foreclosure and foreclosures started all set new records. Only the percentage of loans 30 days past due is still below the record set in the second quarter of 1985.

On the same day the Obama Administration floated a trial balloon to test the waters for extending TARP, the Congressional Oversight Panel heard from experts about TARP's effectiveness. While some of the experts did find aspects of TARP effective, they all testified to significant problems with TARP and the way it was implemented.

Chairwoman Elizabeth Warren set the tone for the hearing, saying that while the Troubled Assets Relief Program had succeeded in preventing a "catastrophic collapse of the financial sector," it was not "designed really to rescue large banks. The broader long-term goals were aimed at strengthening the overall economy and dealing with the alarming number of mortgage foreclosures." How successful was TARP in meeting these larger goals? Not very.

Nowhere are the rights of shareholders more disrespected than at publicly traded investment banks. Wall Street amply demonstrates that the interests of mutual funds and other institutional investors are hardly at the top of their list of concerns. These banks still think of themselves as private partnerships, and they see the public's role as providing liquidity to those partners.

This comes to mind in evaluating the complaints of Goldman Sachs Group's (GS) biggest shareholders who want it to pay out more in dividends and less in bonuses. The Wall Street Journal reports that these whiners include AllianceBernstein, a division of State Street (STT); Wellington Management; and Vanguard Group. These shareholders are concerned that Goldman shouldn't be paying 47% of its revenues to its people.

Dell (DELL) reported results late Thursday, saying its net income dropped 54% in the latest quarter amid signs the company isn't fully benefiting from the computer industry's fledgling recovery. Dell's results missed Wall Street's estimates. Shares fell over 6.5% ahead of the bell.

Goldman Sachs Group's (GS) shareholders finally found a voice. Some of the largest shareholders have asked the company to cut the size of its bonus pool and pass along more of its profits to investors, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the situation.

Investors, analysts and strategists forever debate whether the equity markets are properly valued. That's the whole point of investing, after all, to figure out whether an asset is cheap, and thus poised to go higher, or too expensive, and so set for a fall. There's a bull and a bear case for pretty much any security, but this magical mystery rally has put the debate in especially sharp relief these days. As DailyFinance has noted, stocks look topped out on a technical basis and overpriced to dot-com bubble heights, but also perhaps reasonably valued or even, yes, cheap if you look at price relative to sales.

Mark Twain famously said that history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme. (If it didn't, technical analysis wouldn't work at all.) It also makes comparing today's bull market to that of 1982 an ear-splitting and scary exercise. As the second nastiest recession since World War II -- and the last time we had 10.2% unemployment -- one might think comparing 1982 to 2009 would offer insights into share prices. Barry Ritholtz certainly thinks so. The CEO and director of research at FusionIQ put together such a comparison Thursday, setting the 1982 rally against today's, and it ain't pretty.

U.S. stocks are set for yet another lower open Friday morning after two consecutive days of declines. The technology sector will remain in the spotlight after Dell's (DELL) worse-than-expected earnings reported late Thursday. As a whole, investors may be moving toward safer securities in the absence of confidence in the strength of the economic recovery.

Meanwhile, overseas, Asian markets finished lower and European shares erased their earlier gains after European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet said the ECB will gradually withdraw emergency cash. Banks and energy stocks slipped.

More here: Before the bell: Futures lower on Dell's earnings, ECB move

Crossing Wall Street shows that value investing is the best policy.

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What historically happens to the markets around Thanksgiving Day?

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Since Warren Buffett thinks inflation is going to happen, why isn't he investing in gold?

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Stocks fell sharply Thursday after a sector downgrade and an overseas sell-off caused skittish investors to grow concerned that the rally has outpaced the potential for future earnings growth.

The blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average ($INDU) dropped 93 points, or 0.9%, to 10,334. The broader S&P 500 ($INX) fell 14 points, or 1.3%, to 1,096, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite ($COMPX) shed 36 points, or 1.7%, to finish at 2,157.

Google (GOOG) likes to blow up entire industries. Two weeks ago, the search giant dropped a bomb on the GPS industry with the release of its free and open-source voice-activated navigation app -- sorry, Garmin (GRMN) and TomTom. Google is also in the process of blowing up the productivity applications business with its Google Apps offering, a suite of online email, word processing and other tools that costs a fraction of the price of Windows Office and other Microsoft (MSFT) software.

Today, Google's new Chrome browser-based OS came into clearer focus, and from the looks of it, Google may be en route to blowing up a handful of other businesses.

Facebook looks like its worth close to $10 billion right now, based on actual transactions in the stock. The social networking site has seen its shares surge on an exchange for private companies, suggesting that the company is perceived to be headed in the right direction. Of course, private companies don't have to disclose all their dirty laundry, so assume that the current "market" value is based on only the rosiest of impressions. Some see this as a leading indicator of a Facebook IPO, which is bound to ignite unparalleled excitement.

There's room for a little common sense, though, and investors should take advantage of it. Facebook remains down 33% from its 2007 peak value of $15 billion, and the recent trading activity implies a value slightly below that defined by the latest investment in the company. It probably makes sense to keep the corks in the champagne bottles a little bit longer, but only because the vintage isn't quite right yet.

While the Obama administration floated a trial balloon regarding the possible extension of TARP in The Washington Post Thursday, any hope for that balloon could be quickly burst in hearings today before the Congressional Oversight Panel. Members of the House and Senate already are considering the introduction of bills to kill the unpopular program.

The Congressional Oversight Panel Thursday morning will listen to five experts in a hearing dubbed, "Taking Stock: Independent Views on TARP's Effectiveness."

Sears Holding Corp. (SHLD) posted a smaller third-quarter loss Thursday of $127 million, or $1.09 per share, combating customers' continued desire to spend money elsewhere with tighter inventory management and cost-control efforts. Shares jumped 4% in pre-market trading. Excluding store closing costs and other items, Sears lost 81 cents per share, less than the average estimate of $1.09 loss per share.