A bear market? Never mind

Well, for now anyway. The Dow finished the week at 12,481, up 19 points for the day and 3.1 percent for the week. Turns out that U.S. housing sales rose unexpectedly in February, leading investors to believe that real estate might not be in the awful state that some had described just a couple of weeks ago (see what fun predicting Wall Street can be?). Of course, no market summary would be complete without a little skepticism, so we have economist Ian Shepherdson saying that housing's day of reckoning has merely been delayed. Locally, Thousand Oaks-based Amgen had a bad day, down more than 4 percent, after thecompany announced that it cancelled a clinical trial involving a colon cancer drug because of safety reasons.