Stocks rebounded from a dismal span of trading last week. The Nasdaq was propelled more than 2% higher by a resurgent Apple and a rallying information technology sector that were more than enough to counter a sinking Facebook, while the Dow and the S&P 500 were partly boosted by a meeting of the G8 nations that reiterated support for Greece remaining in the eurozone.

The Dow gained 135 points, with 23 of it 30 components higher; the S&P 500 was up 20; and the Nasdaq jumped 68. Advancers led decliners by 6 to 1 on the NYSE and 10 to 3 on the Nasdaq. The prices of Treasuries weakened. Gold futures fell $3.20 to close at $1,588.70 an ounce, and the price of crude oil rallied from weakness, rising $1.06 to settle at $92.86 a barrel.

In Earnings News

- Lowe's Cos.' fiscal first-quarter profit rose 14%, but the home-improvement company's shares (LOW) fell 10% on concerns that unseasonably warm weather during the quarter might steal sales from later in the year, as homeowners pushed up projects. Lowe's reported profit of $527 million, or 43 cents a share, compared with $461 million, or 34 cents a share, in the year-ago period. Revenue was $13.15 billion, up 7.9%. Same-store sales rose 2.6%, well below rival Home Depot's same-store increase of 5.8% for its most recent quarter.

In Other Business News

- JPMorgan Chase will suspend stock buybacks after experiencing a $2 billion trading loss, CEO Jamie Dimon said at an investor conference. While the company still expects to post $8 billion in profit in 2012, it must suspend the buybacks to maintain higher levels of capital requirements under Basel III. The company's shares (JPM) fell 2.9%.

- Shares of Facebook (FB) sank 10.99% today, one trading session after going public. The drop in share price was disappointing not only for Facebook, but for the initial public offering's lead underwriter, Morgan Stanley. Critics claimed the IPO offered too many shares and was priced too high. There were also concerns about Facebook's quarter-over-quarter revenue loss and General Motor's announcement earlier last week that it was pulling paid advertising from Facebook.

- Apple Inc.'s shares (AAPL) surged 5.8% today after several analyst reports gave positive assessments of Apple's iPhone prospects. Apple's shares had been struggling for weeks on concerns that component shortages would hurt smartphone availability and that wireless carriers would begin cutting subsidies for the iPhone, which could depress sales. The analysts argued these concerns could affect other smartphones more than the iPhone. Apple takes up a large portion of the market-capitalization-weighted Nasdaq, and the index rallied in turn.

*****

Mint.com, a financial aggregation site, studied how much people spend on average per year per pet, and the results are an eye-opener (also a wallet-opener, apparently). The average amount spent on a small dog per year was $580. That jumped to $875 for a large dog, mainly because of food. Surprisingly, a rabbit costs $730 a year, more than a cat ($670), perhaps because rabbit litter must be dusted with gold. Obviously, if your animal has a medical problem, you buy pricier food, or you use specialized pet services like doggie daycare, these amounts could jump significantly. Helpfully for people planning to move to a different part of the country, Mint broke down the different averages by major cities.

I'm fascinated (and sometimes horrified) by studies like Mint's that show the granular level of detail now available about our daily finances. I'm used to budgeting for the biggies—housing, food, car expenses, investments—and then throwing everything else in this vast, impenetrable category ambiguously labeled "miscellaneous." For some reason, when I hear "miscellaneous" I think of small items purchased irregularly, like pens or light bulbs. But this is where the budget busters always seem to come from, perhaps because I haven't properly broken expenses all the way down into their components, all the way down to, for example, the pet-related level. I could figure out how much I spend on pets and pens and light bulbs per year if I wanted to by looking at past receipts or using a financial aggregation service. Instead, I find false comfort in the miscellaneous, assuming I can handle any pen- and light bulb-related emergencies that come my way but forgetting that dogs deserve their own category.

Two dogs live in my house (I would say I "own" the dogs, except that I'm afraid they would laugh at me). One is a 110-pound Rhodesian Ridgeback, aka the Budget Buster, about whom there is nothing miscellaneous; the other is a rescue, a big-eared mutt who barely registers 21 pounds. We got the Ridgeback because we wanted a dog to run with, and Ridgebacks, an African dog bred to hunt lions over long distances, can theoretically run entire marathons and still have enough energy to annoy you to death. Except ours, who hates long-distance running, preferring instead to save his energy entirely for annoyance purposes. That's why we got the little dog (and the little dog's expenses): to annoy the big one. And yet, despite the costs and annoyance and disappointing looks from the neighbors, they're worth all the time and money. And thanks to Mint, now I know how much I'll have to spend annually on an even littler dog to annoy our little dog.

Does the miscellaneous category kill your budget as well? Do you find yourself conveniently ignoring those easy-to-predict categories (like pets), or are all your expenses relentlessly categorized? Leave your thoughts at today's online version.

Wells Fargo Funds Management, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Wells Fargo & Company, provides investment advisory and administrative services for Wells Fargo Advantage Funds^®. Other affiliates of Wells Fargo & Company provide subadvisory and other services for the Funds. The Funds are distributed by Wells Fargo Funds Distributor, LLC, Member FINRA/SIPC, an affiliate of Wells Fargo & Company. 210000

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