"Riding a bumpy road to nowhere, stock prices yesterday ended little changed after a busy session of profit-taking.</br></br>The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.14 to a record 2237.63, one day after registering an unprecedented 54.14-point advance. The broader market indexes were mixed yesterday.</br></br>A flurry of foreign buying pushed up the industrial average more than 17 points in the first half hour of trading yesterday. But most of the gains quickly evaporated as investors took profits in many of Tuesday's winners.</br></br>""It's normal to run into a big bout of profit-taking"" after a surge in prices, a New York-based stock trader said. Sell programs tied to stock-index futures knocked out the rest of the early gains, as well as a lot more, from the market. At noon EST the industrial average was up 8.44, but just a half hour later it was down 17.15 -- a swing of more than 25 points. Stocks slowly recovered most of their losses throughout the afternoon.</br></br>It's a ""victory for the bulls"" that the market could absorb all the profit-taking, said Philip Erlanger, technical analyst at Advest, Hartford, Conn."