Paul Shread

Note: There will be no Technical Analysis on Wednesday, Nov. 26, or Friday, Nov. 28. It will return Monday, Dec. 1. Happy Holidays. With a market nearing overbought levels, a very low equity put-call ratio, and the VIX, the options volatility index (first chart below), setting a new multi-year low, danger has increased for longs. […]

The storage sector has always had its periods of pricing pressure, but lately the pressure to cut prices has grown particularly intense. A number of trends — among them the rise of low-cost IP storage, the entry of new players, and a glut of start-ups — have converged to squeeze margins among storage vendors. “Besides […]

E-tailers could be in for some holiday cheer, according to Goldman Sachs. The Wall Street research firm said Tuesday that early results from its fifth annual holiday survey on consumer attitudes and spending patterns indicate that e-commerce is off to a good start for the holidays this year. The report translated into gains for the […]

Novellus capped a strong day for stocks Monday by raising guidance after hours. Novellus said it expects December quarter earnings of 6 cents a share, a penny ahead of analyst estimates and at the top end of the company’s previous guidance range. Revenues of $220 million would exceed analyst estimates of $217 million. NVLS rose […]

HP has introduced new entry-level storage offerings that the company claims cost 25-50% less than comparable solutions from Dell/EMC and IBM. The HP StorageWorks Modular Smart Array (MSA) family includes two direct-attached storage (DAS) offerings and one storage area network (SAN) model. “They’re coming in at very competitive pricing,” Mike Karp, senior analyst at Enterprise […]

Shares of Brocade tumbled 17% Friday after reporting results that were down from last year. The results were in line with expectations – but investors were hoping for more because Brocade’s aggressive pricing in the quarter was expected to steal business away from storage switch leader McData . McData was forced to concede on prices […]

The market has been oversold since Tuesday’s close, yet has made little headway, and sentiment hasn’t been as supportive as we would prefer. However, Thanksgiving is historically one of the most positive periods for the market – the next four trading days have been up 70-80% of the time in the last 30 years, so […]

With a little more than a month to go before the oft-predicted 2004 recovery in tech spending is expected to begin, top executives in the sector are still issuing qualified outlooks. Hewlett-Packard and Intel execs were the latest to suggest that the rebound may not be as robust as hoped. “We’re not counting on a […]

Cisco has unveiled high-end storage networking features for its MDS 9000 directors and fabric switches, including SAN management, security, and multiprotocol transport offerings. The new features are available through MDS 9000 SAN-OS 1.3, the latest version of the platform’s operating system. Cisco claims a number of industry firsts for the new features, including the first […]

We have the same situation we had when the market was oversold two days ago: a nice spike in the VIX (first chart below, the options volatility index), but a complacent equity put-call ratio. While options expiration could be to blame for the low PC ratio, it’s still not what we’d like to see for […]

Hewlett-Packard beat earnings and revenue estimates after the close on Wednesday. Earnings of 36 cents a share beat estimates by a penny, and revenues of $19.85 billion came in well ahead of $19.04 billion forecasts. For next quarter, HP reaffirmed guidance of 35 cents a share, and revenue guidance of $19.1-19.5 billion compared favorably to […]

InfiniBand switch start-ups InfiniCon Systems, Topspin, and Voltaire have released the first 30 gigabit per second InfiniBand switches. With pricing as low as $300-$700 per port, the switches are 50-75% cheaper than 2Gb Fibre Channel and 98% cheaper than 10Gb Ethernet. “The breakthrough levels in performance and price … will continue to make InfiniBand fabrics […]