Investing

7 Major Stock Events From This Last Week You Should Not Miss

What a great week that stocks managed to have. Some technicians will say that the prior Friday’s lows were close enough to a retest of the August lows that a bottom was put in for now. Other technicians will disagree. However you decide to cut it yourself, we cannot ignore that the Dow Jones industrial Average closed at 17,084 on Friday — a gain of over 1,070 points from the lows of the prior Friday when the jobs report was so minimal.

24/7 Wall St. wanted to highlight seven major stock moves that investors simply cannot ignore. There were major bits of news and almost all of these stocks outperformed the broad market.

Alcoa Inc. (NYSE: AA) has just tipped its hand about what it thinks of the future, by announcing that it will break itself up into two separate companies. This puts the growth and technology product business on its own. It also leaves the old-school aluminum and alumina dependence on its own without any cover. Our take is that this is a mistake. It could make the weaker side of the business just that much weaker. Alcoa closed down almost 7% at $10.26 on Friday due to poor earnings, but the gain in commodity and metals stocks still allowed shares closed up an impressive 7.7% for the week.

General Electric Co. (NYSE: GE) was such a stud on the Dow that you might have thought it was a tech stock with great news. After Nelson Peltz and Trian took a stake, GE shares closed up 10% at $28.07 on the week. GE shares are now up 8 of the last 10 sessions. On Friday, 24/7 Wall St. outlined why GE may be headed to 52-week and multi-year highs as it is only about 2% shy of that now. Keep in mind that GE has yet to really start piling all that cash into the market to buy its shares.

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Google Inc. is now Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL). This may be a game-changer for how the company funds all those skunkworks projects. It is also just that much more confusion after the company’s stock split created a dual-class of shares. Larry and Sergey will keep unloading shares to secure their billions in cash, but they will get to keep control of Google (sorry, Alphabet) voting and operations due to that class split. At $670.00, the “GOOGL” shares are $43.00 shy of highs. Credit Suisse does not seem concerned at all, it raised its target price to $815 from $750 on Friday.

Micron Technology, Inc. (NASDAQ: MU) led the charge for semiconductors on a post-earnings basis. This last week it rallied 14%, despite a drop of 3% on Friday, and its shares are now up a whopping 34% from the 52-week low of $13.50 that was seen just on August 24. Now Barron’s is even touting Micron, calling for big upside and noting that Micron could rebound based upon upcoming products and the chip industry’s consolidation.

Spark Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ: ONCE) may not be a household name, but this week it surged on news of very promising eye treatments for blindness. It looked as though the stock had popped too much when it rose from $44 to $53, falling back to under $45 in two days. Then shares came climbing back up and the stock closed out the week at $49.30 for a gain of 12% on the week.

Starbucks Corp. (NASDAQ: SBUX) has defied all of the caution that investors felt. Maybe they realize that the turbo-charged caffeine and the other goodies in the stores were going to keep everyone piling into the shops whether the economy is adding 130,000 jobs or 300,000 jobs a month. Starbucks hit an all-time high of $60.11 and it closed out the week at $60.07. With shares up almost 50% so far in 2015, do we dare ask if another split could be in the works? Starbucks is now worth a whopping $89 billion.

Twitter Inc. (NYSE: TWTR) may be back in vogue. Jack Dorsey was officially signed on as Twitter’s CEO, its Moments is viewed positively, the Saudi Prince upped his stake, and other good things are coming down the pipe. Shares closed up over 17% for the week at $30.85 and the stock was also named in the 8 stocks with 50% to 100% upside calls this last week as well. Whether this overcomes slow user growth has yet to be seen, but Twitter’s valuation is back to almost $21 billion versus revenue expectations of about $2.2 billion in 2015 and $3.2 billion in 2016.

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For those awaiting earnings season, here is what you might want to be prepared to expect from major energy and oil and gas giants.

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