Paul Shread

Despite another quarter of stellar results and guidance, investors opted to take profits in HP and the Nasdaq on Friday. Weighing on the stock was news that the SEC has upgraded its probe of the company’s boardroom leak scandal into a formal investigation, along with the sense that the good news was largely priced in […]

Not the broadest of rallies today, but stocks remain pointed up until proven otherwise. Still, with a number of indicators overbought and sentiment getting a little frothy, there’s plenty of reason for caution here. The S&P (first chart below) continues to stall at 1400, with 1414-1426 a big resistance zone above that. First support is […]

HP continued to be the most consistent story in technology Thursday, posting quarterly results and guidance after the close that once again topped Wall Street’s expectations. It was the ninth straight quarter that HP has beaten analysts’ estimates. Continuing its two-year turnaround, HP’s October quarter sales rose 7% to $24.6 billion, $500 million ahead of […]

Top InfiniBand chipmaker Mellanox Technologies unveiled its fourth-generation adapter architecture at Supercomputing 2006 in Tampa, Fla., this week. Mellanox, which supplies silicon to Cisco and Voltaire, among others, took the wraps off ConnectX, which incorporates connectivity to 1 and 10 Gigabit Ethernet fabrics in addition to SCSI, iSCSI and Fibre Channel storage protocols. Thanks to […]

Someone finally woke up and realized there’s a rally going on. The Investors Intelligence survey of investment advisors showed a big spike in bulls to 56.4% this week, and a big drop in bears to 22.3%, a four-point move in each. Since tops the last few years have typically occurred around the 60-20 area, that’s […]

Applied Materials posted 47% year-over-year sales growth in its October quarter, but that was less than Wall Street was looking for. AMAT’s sales of $2.52 billion were shy of $2.56 billion forecasts, and earnings of 30 cents a share were a penny light. The chip equipment maker also predicted a 5-10% sequential decline sales and […]

Another day, another breakout, and until traders show signs of excess enthusiasm, that trend will likely continue. The S&P (first chart below) has the best-defined resistance levels at this point, so we’ll start with that index. First up is 1395, the equivalent of 1400 on the futures, where the index stalled today. Above that, the […]

Good news on inflation sent stocks surging once again on Tuesday, and beaten-down stocks like Intel and Home Depot led the way. A better than expected wholesale inflation report and encouraging words on interest rates by St. Louis Fed President William Poole encouraged buyers, and Home Depot and Wal-Mart gained on turnaround hopes despite lackluster […]

Symantec on Tuesday announced plans to move disk-based backup away from legacy tape environments. A new application programming interface (API) called the Symantec NetBackup OpenStorage API, set for release in mid-2007, will allow intelligent disk devices to integrate natively with NetBackup backup and recovery software instead of having to emulate tape in a virtual tape […]

The Nasdaq (first chart below) has taken the lead here as blue chips stall out. Tech leadership is a pretty healthy thing for the market, as long as it doesn’t become too extreme. One modest negative we’d note is that commercial futures traders remain short the big S&P contract; since they were net long at […]

Tech stocks gained Monday on upgrades to Dell and Intel , but the biggest news of the week lies ahead. Intel gained 2% on a Citigroup upgrade of the chip sector, with stocks like Novellus faring even better. Dell, meanwhile, gained 2.4% on a Deutsche Bank buy rating ahead of its quarterly results on Thursday, […]

EMC has added archiving capabilities to its Rainfinity file virtualization and management solution, adding support for its Centera content addressed storage (CAS) platform. With the change, version 7.0 of the Rainfinity Global File Virtualization solution “now offers customers a single platform to manage both active and inactive files throughout a file’s lifecycle across heterogeneous environments,” […]