Paul Shread

An analyst’s downgrade of Dell and rising oil prices overshadowed a solid quarter from Google on Friday. Dell fell 4% on a Citigroup “sell” rating that said the company may need to cut prices and accept lower margins to regain market share. “The slow, steady erosion of Dell’s cost advantage combined with the company’s heavy […]

Once upon a time, companies needed to have a few quarters of profitability under their belt before going public. Those times still haven’t returned. Riverbed, a promising startup in the red-hot wide area file services (WAFS) and WAN optimization space, filed plans for an initial public offering late Thursday. Riverbed, which calls its market “wide […]

Shares of Google jumped in after hours trading Thursday after the search giant handily beat Wall Street estimates. Google’s earnings of $2.29 a share beat $1.98 estimates, and revenues after traffic acquisition costs grew 92% to $1.53 billion, surpassing $1.44 billion forecasts. Google’s shares jumped 6% on the news. The results — and Wall Street’s […]

Rising interest rates and oil prices had little effect on tech stocks today, but they held back blue chips. Still, given the day’s inflation news, buyers showed resilience. The Nasdaq (first chart below) is pushing five-year highs at 2375, with 2390-2400 above that. 2350 and 2328-2333 are support. The Dow (second chart) faces resistance at […]

Apple , eBay and Intel all posted results late Wednesday that came up short of Wall Street estimates, but only eBay shares were punished on the news. eBay fell 5% in late trading after meeting estimates with earnings of 24 cents a share on sales of $1.39 billion, a 35% growth rate. But the company’s […]

Scentric came out of stealth mode on Wednesday with an information classification and management (ICM) product that the company says is the first to offer universal classification across all data types. ICM is a subset of information lifecycle management (ILM) that proponents say could make ILM at the file level a reality. The technology has […]

Mae West may have said that too much of a good thing can be wonderful, but that’s not always the case with the stock market. Take today’s 90% upside day (volume and price action) on the NYSE. Paul Desmond of Lowry’s Reports, who pioneered the study of such buying and selling climaxes, said odds are […]

Yahoo and IBM posted quarterly results late Tuesday that were in line with Wall Street forecasts. Yahoo shares jumped 5% in late trading after the company posted 32.5% sales growth to $1.09 billion, topping $1.08 billion forecasts. Earnings were 11 cents a share — 15 cents after accounting for stock options — compared to 11-cent […]

The Nasdaq (first chart below) should have solid support at 2295-2300. If that fails to hold, 2280 is the next strong support level. To the upside, 2333 is turning out to be tough resistance once again. The Dow (second chart) has broken quite a bit of support, but it doesn’t seem to be going down […]

EMC on Monday announced a number of changes to its virtual tape library (VTL) product lineup. The changes to the Clariion Disk Library family include a new entry-level Clariion DL210 model for mid-size enterprises and branch offices, and for the whole line, virtual tape “shredding” capability for deleting data to meet business and regulatory demands. […]

A startup launched by McData founder Jack McDonnell hopes to remake high-performance storage systems with a grid-like approach. Westminster, Colo.-based Crosswalk on Tuesday launched its iGrid Intelligent Storage Grid System, which the company bills as a “vendor-agnostic grid technology that enables any application to access any authorized storage resource, any iGrid node to access any […]

Note: The Technical Analysis column will return on Monday, April 17. The Nasdaq (first chart below) is back at the critical 2328-2333 support level. If that goes, 2300 and 2240 are the next major support levels. Resistance is 2350 and 2370-2375. Important support levels on the Dow (second chart) are 11,000, 11,070 and 11,025 or […]