Paul Shread

Oracle tried to right a staggering market after the close on Monday with better than expected earnings. Oracle rose 2% after hours after beating expectations by a penny a share with 12-cent earnings, and revenues of $2.5 billion topped $2.41 billion forecasts. Software license sales rose 13% to $849 million, also well ahead of estimates, […]

Today’s dramatic reversal aside, we’ll resist the urge to grow too bearish just yet. For starters, while the news was good, it had little fundamental impact, so with the rally already a little shaky, the exuberance in the overnight futures was a good excuse to take profits. However, with the speed of today’s decline, more […]

The market’s resilience in the face of mixed economic news the last two days is positive. Also on the plus side, the equity put-call ratio remains above the .45 danger zone despite “Dow 10,000” headlines on front pages everywhere this morning. However, we’d note a few negatives here. First, the Nasdaq rally has occurred on […]

It’s that time of year again when the Nasdaq stock market decides what’s hot and what’s not. The annual rebalancing of the Nasdaq 100 – the 100 largest non-financial stocks that trade on the Nasdaq – was announced today, with eight stocks removed and eight added. In as of Dec. 22 are Marvell , Garmin […]

Decru and NeoScale Systems have followed Vormetric with new storage security offerings of their own. Both say they now offer protection for tape in addition to NAS, SAN, and DAS. Decru says its new Decru DataFort T520 provides encryption, authentication, and logging capabilities for tape backup environments, bolstering a tape security product line that already […]

AT&T has yet another plan to revitalize itself. This time, it’s Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). AT&T has been squeezed in recent years by low-cost competition and the entry of the Baby Bells into the long distance market. While AT&T faces tough competition in the new endeavor – Baby Bells, cable companies and a host […]

ONStor has unveiled an enterprise-class file service solution that compares favorably to offerings from NetApp and EMC. ONStor says its SF4400 Series SAN filer is the first to consolidate enterprise-wide file storage on heterogeneous storage area networks (SANs), and is the only single hardware and software platform for managing enterprise-wide file services on open SAN […]

Well, we know what tomorrow’s headlines are going to read: “Dow Tops 10,000.” The question is, what will the reaction be? Our guess is that investors may begin to relax – and thus we may begin to see greater complacency creep into the market, a potential negative to watch for. The Dow’s finish was wobbly […]

The Nasdaq and S&P (first two charts below) are trying to bounce from oversold levels. While we’d prefer a close in oversold territory, some upside follow-through to today’s action is possible. The Nasdaq has resistance at 1915-1920, 1927-1930, and 1937-1940, and support is 1887-1890 and 1878-1880. The S&P has resistance at 1063-1064, 1069-1074 and 1083-1093, […]

Better than expected guidance from EMC and upbeat comments from Cisco provided some support for the market on Wednesday, but it wasn’t enough to avoid another losing session. Cisco rose 2% after CEO John Chambers said at the company’s analyst meeting that business confidence is improving. Juniper lost 2% after Cisco unveiled a new 40 […]

Ah, those big round numbers. They act like both a magnet and a repellent. Perhaps now that Dow 10,000 and Nasdaq 2,000 have been touched, the market can consolidate for a while before another attempt. The Dow and S&P (first two charts below) are in such tight trading ranges that a 1% move either way […]

After listening to customer feedback for the last couple of years, Vormetric has revamped its approach to storage security. And according to at least one analyst, the result may just be the strongest offering available. “I was not impressed with them a year or so ago, but they adjusted well to customer input and may […]