Paul Shread

Mergers, stronger than expected new home sales and new offerings from the Wintel duo got stocks off to a solid start to the week on Monday. Microsoft rose 1.4% on a unified communications offering, while Intel climbed 1.6% after leapfrogging AMD in the server chip battle. AMD shares lost 1.9%. The broader market got a […]

Not much new to report today, as the indexes remain range-bound. The best indexes to watch to clues as to the next move are the S&P and Nasdaq (first two charts below). The S&P faces resistance at 1256 and 1262, and support is 1240, 1235-1237 and 1232. The Nasdaq faces resistance at 2132 and 2150, […]

Strong earnings from Oracle did little to help the broader market Friday, as investors fretted about an unexpected drop in durable orders ahead of next week’s Federal Reserve meeting. Oracle gained 4% after reporting strong application and database sales late Thursday, its second bit of good news in a week. The company also raised sales […]

Oracle posted better than expected results late Thursday on strong application and database sales. Orcale, which pre-announced better than expected results last week, reported May quarter earnings of 29 cents a share. Sales rose 25% to $4.85 billion, with database and middleware new license revenues up 18% and applications new license sales up 83%, or […]

How to best address the problem of storage management has become almost as confusing as storage management itself, with a number of groups springing up with the goal of making storage management easier. The divisions became a little sharper on Thursday, when Sun said it is leaving IBM’s Aperi effort to focus on the Storage […]

Today marks the second time in a week that stocks started a rally with poor internals and were able to recover to post strong gains the next day. Buyers were also able to push the Dow (first chart below) through the major resistance level of 11,030-11,050, which is now important first support, with 11,000, 10,950 […]

HP paced a strong rally in the tech sector Wednesday, rising 2.7% on its latest cost-cutting plan, while the broader market surged on strong earnings reports from FedEx and Morgan Stanley . HP shares have gained 39% since first announcing major job cuts last July. “We are encouraged by the announcement as it indicates HP […]

The Dow (first chart below) struggled for the fourth straight day at the major resistance level of 11,030-11,050, and market internals were decidedly weak. A lot for the market to overcome here. To the downside, the 200-day moving average at 10,892 is important support. The S&P (second chart) faces resistance at 1245, 1252, 1255 and […]

Tech stocks got off to a solid start Tuesday on a Prudential upgrade of the chip equipment sector, but the Nasdaq gave back all its gains by the close. Prudential analyst Ben Pang said the “current risk-versus-reward scenario is strongly in favor of a significant price appreciation from the current levels,” and he said he […]

Storage vendors are using the occasion of this week’s Storage World Conference in Long Beach, Calif., to showcase their wares aimed at helping users gain control of far-flung data. FalconStor, for one, joined the throng of vendors offering data de-duplication with its new Single Instance Repository (SIR) software, which provides a policy-driven redundant data elimination […]

News of a blockbuster telecom equipment deal between Nokia and Siemens did little to help the rest of the sector on Monday. Nortel shares fared the worst, shedding 10% on competitive concerns, as the company was already left behind by the pending merger between Lucent and Alcatel . Motorola is another company that may now […]

A victory of sorts for the bulls today, with little profit-taking after two days of very big gains. The one negative is they couldn’t put much of a dent in the major resistance level of 11,040-11,050 on the Dow (first chart below). Support is 10,950 and 10,888. The S&P (second chart) faces resistance at 1262 […]