Stocks Opened Lower on European Elections

U.S. stocks began with losses on Monday after elections in France and Greece added more uncertainty to euro-zone efforts to grapple with sovereign debt. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lately fell 32.32 points, or 0.25%, to 13,005.95. The S&P 500 Index lost 1.40 points, or 0.10%, to 1,367.70. The Nasdaq Composite fell 2.12 points, or 0.07%, to 2,954.22.

Greek voters punished the country’s pro-bailout political parties and François Hollande defeated French President Nicolas Sarkozy in weekend elections. Greek party leaders will begin talks Monday in an effort to form a government, but prospects for a coalition appeared dim after the inconclusive results.

After years of gloom and doom, the outlook for the U.S. trade deficit has suddenly turned sunny. After sharply narrowing in the prior month, economists polled by MarketWatch expect the trade gap to widen in March to $49.5 billion, near the high end of its range over the past year, due to higher oil prices.

Dish Network Corp (DISH), the second-largest satellite TV company behind DirecTV, added more subscribers than expected in the first quarter after holding the line on prices for its programming packages. Dish, whose shares rose 1 percent in premarket trading, added a net 104,000 subscribers during the quarter, topping analysts’ average estimate of 62,000, according to StreetAccount data. It was Dish’s second quarter in a row of subscriber growth, after shedding about 250,000 subscribers during the second and third quarters of 2011.

China sales by Japan’s Toyota Motor Corp and its two local joint-venture partners rose 68 percent in April from a year earlier to about 81,700 vehicles, according to a company spokesman. For the first four months of the year, the Japanese auto maker sold a total of about 293,200 vehicles, a 14.3 percent increase from the same period last year, said the spokesman, Takanori Yokoi.