Lululemon Athletica Inc. (NASDAQ: LULU) hit a new all-time high on Friday, so this downgrade does not matter too much except that it means one more negative call about overvaluation. LULU was downgraded to Neutral at Stern Agee on Thursday.
Renren Inc. (NYSE: RENN) had a good week after Credit Suisse initiated coverage with an “Outperform” rating, something that the IPO victims probably feel happy about. On Tuesday it closed at $7.60 but the upgrade took it up to $8
.57 and then the rest of the rally took it up above $9.00. What is interesting is that the price target was only $9.20 and shares hit a high of $9.29. Does Credit Suisse have to now issue a downgrade based on its price target being hit?
Sears Holding Corporation (NASDAQ: SHLD) does not get much in analyst calls, but Zacks left the shadow over it when it maintained its “Underperform” rating and gave it the dubious honor of being “The Bear of the Day.” Sears shares rose this week, but not as much as many peers.
Spreadtrum Communications Inc. (NASDAQ: SPRD) was hit hard by Muddy Waters on a short selling note, but the company defended itself and two analysts also gave positive ratings on the stock. This one was already negative with the trends coming out of China and the stock actually rallied massively. In fact, if you bought at the peak of selling on Tuesday morning and sold at 2:30 on Friday you could have quite literally doubled your money. We also were curious about this notion, without damning short sellers: Should short sellers be able to publicize their trading?
Western Digital Corporation (NYSE: WDC) found itself a market winner and it was also re-upped by us as one of our few repeat Deep Value Core Tech Stocks for the Rest of 2011 this week. Still, S&P Equity Research cut its rating to “Strong Sell” from what was an already-cautious “Hold” rating.
Glencore International does not trade in the U.S. but this does matter for many large commodity and metals conglomerate structures. The recent IPO had been a dud and had fallen consistently up until this week. Now the gloves are off after the quiet period and analysts gave it very positive coverage. Here are the basic calls we saw, but we are not paying attention to price detail because it trades in London:
- UBS started it at Buy;
- Soc-Gen started it at Buy;
- Citigroup started it at Buy;
- Credit Suisse started it at Outperform;
- J.P. Morgan started it at Neutral;
- Morgan Stanley started it at Overweight.
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JON C. OGG
