Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL) is going to have to make some more threats if he wants the EU to approve his company’s deal to buy Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ:JAVA) for $9.50 a share. The Europeans have voiced some concerns that the combined company will have too much market share in the MySQL server software industry.
The EU’s concerns became more concrete today. Read More
Abercrombie & Fitch Co. (NYSE: ANF) surged over 7% to a yearly high of $37.80 after the company was upgraded from “neutral” to “buy” by anlysts at Goldman Sachs.
DISH Network Corp. (NASDAQ: DISH) was up over 8% at its peak at a yearly high of $20.80 after the company announced that it would pay a one-time dividend of $2 for all Class A and B shares.
RadioShack Corp. (NYSE: RSH) rose over 14% today to a yearly high of $20.57 after the electronics retailer announced that it plans to sell Apple iPhones in some of its stores that are located in major metropolitian areas. This announcement has precipitated some analyst upgrades.
Revlon Inc. (NYSE: REV) surged over 37% today to a yearly high of $15.06. The company announced that it intends to offer $330 million in senior notes that will be due in 2015 in order to pay off debt due in 2011. The company was also upgraded to “outperform” by BMO Capital Markets.
Garrett W. McIntyre
JDS Uniphase Corp. (NASDAQ: JDSU) is seeing a run in the stock and in the options trading today. The company announced this morning that had “licensed patent rights for fundamental picosecond laser technology to Hamamatsu Corporation for the development of microelectronic products.” Yet there may be more to the story here as some consider it one possible takeout or merger target in the land of technology. This notion of an acquisition may seem impossible if you have known the company since it was a $100 and far higher stock back in the tech bubble days.
Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) is up with the broad market today by almost 2%, and shares are completely unphased at all on news that the company is spending $750 million in shares to acquire AdMob. While Google has made many deals, this is aimed to go deeper into the technology for mobile display advertising and will give advertisers more choice in mobile advertising.
Read More
A new website called BillionaireXchange just launched. It is an online destination for people who wish they were rich to buy and sell goods and services on the internet from people who used to be rich.
Douglas A. McIntyre
Oil and gas companies have closed or winding down many US Gulf operations ahead of a very late in the year Hurricane Ida. The weekend reports had this one dissipating then the reports early this morning had this making landfall as a tropical storm with [a possibility of it being hurricane. This morning Ida became a tropical storm again at the National Hurricane Center. In order to not have to out-guess ahead of time which companies will be least or most impacted had this been a full hurricane at the time it met rigs and the coast, we looked at the Oil Services HOLDRs (NYSE: OIH), the United States Oil (NYSE: USO) ETF and the iPath S&P GSCI Crude Oil Total Return Index ETN (NYSE: OIL) reactions based upon the supply data. While the infrastructure is now not as likely to be hit as hard and while a tropical storm is far less of a threat than a hurricane, NYMEX WTI Crude is actually still up $1.78 at $79.21 as of 10:13 AM EST.
Read More
Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: CSCO) has filed a preliminary prospectus supplement under an existing shelf registration with the SEC this morning for a three-part debt offering. While no final amount was stated, and no terms and no maturities were given, these are likely in the process of getting worked out now. The networking giant plans three maturities of senior notes in an offering via Barclays Capital, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank Securities, BofA Merrill Lynch, HSBC, and J.P. Morgan.
Read More
GM sold 166,911 cars and light trucks in China last month. The No.1 US auto company sold 177,603 vehicles in its domestic market in the same period. The FT reports that “A total of 946,400 passenger cars were sold in October, up sharply from 538,500 units sold a year earlier.”
Updated throughout the day.
Updated at 11.49 AM EST: Reynolds Americam (NYSE:RAI) may buy Niconovum, a Swedish maker of nicotine gum and mouth sprays (Boomberg)
Updated at 10.12 AM EST: Wells Fargo (NYSE:WFC) may pay back its TARP funds. (BreakingViews)
Updated at 9.48 AM EST: Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp (NYSE:NWS) may sue the BBC for breach of copyright for “stealing” material from his newspapers. (FT)
It will take a bid of 800 pence to get Cadbury to agree to a Kraft (NYSE:KFT) takeover. The current hostile bid is for 713 pence. (various)
GE (NYSE:GE) and Comcast (NASDAQ:CMCSA) have agreed to value NBCU at $30 billion (WSJ)
The EU may approved Oracle’s (NASDAQ:ORCL) buy-out of Sun (NASDAQ:JAVA) if it gives up some of its control of the MySQL database software (BusinesssWeek)
The rally in GE’s (NYSE:GE) stock may not last very long. (TheStreet)
China may raise fuel prices this week. (CNBC)
Delta (NYSE:DAL) and American Air (NYSE:AMR) are increasing their pressure on the Japanese government to forge joint ventures with Japan Airlines. (The Deal)
New collaborative software tools from Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO) will put it into direct competition with Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) (CNET)
Sprint (NYSE:S), Intel (NYSE:INTC), and Time Warner Cable (NYSE:TWC) may put another $1.5 billion into 4G provider Clearwire (NASDAQ:CLWR)
Douglas A. McIntyre
These are this Monday’s top day trader and active traders stock alerts. We have a link for more detailed analysis and price/volume data at VSInvestor.com:
Ariad Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: ARIA) is up 10% as traders hope the analyst upgrade may hint at it being the next hot low price biotech stock.
East West Bancorp Inc. (NASDAQ: EWBC) is soaring by 27% on it winning in an FDIC-led bank takeover.
General Electric Co. (NYSE: GE) is up again by almost 3% this morning on a likely NBC Universal valuation of close to $30 billion.
McDonald’s Corp. (NYSE: MCD) is up almost 1% on same store sales, but U.S. same store sales remain more of a concern than some of its other growth.
Abercrombie & Fitch Co. (NYSE: ANF) is up 5% on an analyst upgrade.
You can join our open email distribution list to get updates on top analyst upgrades and downgrades, top day trader alerts, IPO’s, secondary offerings, Warren Buffett and other guru activity, M&A and more.
Jon C. Ogg
November 9, 2009
John Tamny , Forbes
Recently the Dow Jones Industrial Average passed the psychologically significant 10,000 mark. This is an impressive feat for an index that was trading in the 6,000 range less than nine months ago.
While naysayers would correctly point out that the Dow remains flat compared to 10 years ago, the run-up since last spring can’t be dismissed out of hand. This is particularly true when we consider policies coming out of Washington that seem inimical to stock market and economic health.
These are this Monday’s top ten analyst calls with upgrades, downgrades, and initiations in Wall Street research calls:
Adobe Systems (NASDAQ: ADBE) Raised to Buy at Goldman Sachs.
Ariad Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: ARIA) Raised to Overweight at JP Morgan.
Blackstone Group (NYSE: BX) Raised to Outperform at KBW.
Charles River Labs (CRL) Cut to Equal Weight at Barclays.
Gap Inc. (GPS) Cut to Equal Weight at Barclays.
Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) Cut to Neutral at Goldman Sachs.
Capstead Mortgage (NYSE: CMO) Raised to Outperform at KBW.
RadioShack (NYSE: RSH) Raised to Outperform at Credit Suisse.
Veeco Instruments Inc. (NASDAQ: VECO) Started as Overweight at Piper Jaffray.
VeriSign (NASDAQ: VRSN) Cut to Sell at Goldman Sachs.
You can join our open email distribution list to get updates on top analyst upgrades and downgrades, top day trader alerts, IPO’s, secondary offerings, Warren Buffett and other guru activity, M&A and more.
Jon C. Ogg
November 9, 2009
Activision Blizzard (NASDAQ:ATVI) is about to release its “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II: video game. Sales are expected to be half a billion dollars in the first week. That would make it the biggest entertainment product release of all time, topping even the most successful blockbuster movies.
According to the LA Times, “Activision is working with retailers to plan more than 10,000 midnight openings in the United States, including most of the 4,300 GameStop stores around the country.” Read More
By Douglas A. McIntyre
It has been months since a hurricane posed a real threat to oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. Now, Hurricane Ida is entering the region from the west after doing significant damage in Nicaragua.
Most hurricanes that move into the Gulf end up doing very little damage to either deep sea drilling platforms or the refineries around Houston, but traders still get nervous about the potential interruption in oil supply.
By Douglas A. McIntyre
Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs (GS) has put an unusual spin on the bank’s activities. He says his firm is doing “God’s work.” This may seem like an audacious statement coming from a man whose company has been harshly criticized for planning to give many of its employees multi-million pay packages just a bit more than a year after the collapse of the credit markets.
The cynic’s view of Wal-Mart’s (NYSE:WMT) new expansion of its Great Value private label food brand is that it is aimed at making as much money as possible from those who are out of work or work for the minimum wage. The New York Times reports that Wal-Mart is marketing the brand as a way for food shoppers to get good meals for “less than $2 a serving.” It might not be too crass to say that the program is nothing but the big box retailer’s equivalent of the McDonald’s (NYSE:MCD) $1 “Value Meals.” Read More
NBC Universal, the entertainment arm of GE (NYSE:GE) which is 20% owned by Vivendi, is worth $30 billion. That is the figure that GE and Comcast (NASDAQ:CMCSA), the cable company that intends to take control of NBCU agree on. Vivendi may be willing to take $6 billion for its piece of NBCU and if so, the valuation is to some extent academic. The $30 billion will also decide how much money Comcast will put into the joint venture that will own NBCU.
The Wall Street Journal has made the point that Vivendi could walk away from selling its stake and ruin the entire transaction, but it is hard to see what the French company would gain from that. Read More
Some experts raised the issue of how long the recovery can last as unemployment went over 10% last week and the total number of people out of jobs or looking for full-time work topped 17% of the able-bodied population. It is a very reasonable question. The term “double dip” recession is still thrown around daily by economic pessimists. Their optimistic counterparts believe that American exports will pick up because of less expensive domestic labor, a weak dollar, and the recovery of consumer spending in large developing nations like China. Businesses will begin to restock inventories because they are at historic lows and the firms, especially retailers, cannot be caught short on supplies if there is a surge in customer buying, for whatever reason. But, the most impressive argument for better GDP numbers near-term is that the federal government has bought them with its $787 billion spending package. Read More
Microsoft (NYSE:MSFT) Windows 7 sales in the first week after its introduction last month outdid Vista sales during the first week after its launch in January 2007 by 234%, according to industry research firm NPD. Microsoft has certainly encouraged the rumors that the operating system is doing well, but that no longer appears to be an empty boast. Read More
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