Paul Shread

Once again, the market gapped down into oversold territory but didn’t stay there. As Charles Dow first remarked more than 100 years ago, the positions that traders are willing to stay with overnight are most significant. For that reason, closing at or near the lows when the market is oversold gives the market a better […]

McDATA has rolled out the first new product from its recent acquisition of Nishan Systems, an IP switch that gives Cisco a run for its money. The Eclipse 1620 is a four-port switch that supports iSCSI, iFCP, and Fibre Channel, and combines intelligent network services with unified management support via SANavigator. It also provides 3-5 […]

Microsoft beat estimates and raised guidance after the close on Thursday, but traders nonetheless were disappointed in the results. Earnings of 30 cents a share beat estimates by a penny, and revenues of $8.22 billion topped $8.09 forecasts. The company’s December quarter guidance of 29-30 cents exceeded analysts’ 28-cent estimates, and revenue guidance of $9.7-9.8 […]

An unlikely suspect escaped a broad market sell-off on Wednesday: Lucent , which soared 13% after posting its first profit in 3 1/2 years. Revenues continue to decline at the troubled telecom equipment maker, but after $5.6 billion in cost-cutting, investors were happy just to see a profit. Would it be that Amazon investors were […]

Amazon.com did a good impersonation of Cisco’s late-1990s ‘penny above’ routine after the close on Tuesday. Pro forma earnings of 11 cents a share topped estimates by a penny, and revenues of $1.13 billion topped $1.12 billion forecasts. Fourth quarter revenue guidance of $1.76-1.91 billion compared favorably to $1.78 billion forecasts, and Amazon issued $5.75-6.25 […]

We got a little bit of fear this morning in the CBOE equity put-call ratio, but this pullback had none of the fear of the Aug. 5, Aug. 26, Sept. 10 or Sept. 30 bottoms, so we remain skeptical of the market’s ability to rally significantly from here. The VIX (first chart below), the options […]

IBM has embraced open standards to boost the data recovery capabilities of its TotalStorage Enterprise Storage Server (ESS), codenamed “Shark.” IBM will add Fibre Channel (FC) support for Shark’s Peer-to-Peer Remote Copy (PPRC) disaster recovery and remote backup software, resulting in data transfer up to eight times faster than Big Blue’s own proprietary ESCON technology, […]

The indexes briefly hit oversold levels today; is that it for the correction? It could be, but this should not to be mistaken for the oversold readings that occurred at the end of September, when fear was at much higher levels. The VIX (first chart below), the options volatility index, is at a level not […]

Panasas appears to take the word “launch” a little too literally. The clustered Linux storage start-up came out of stealth mode today with record-shattering performance and the single largest Linux storage deployment to date — a stunning 120 terabytes at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). As if that weren’t enough, the company also announced six […]

The wireless sector has been a laggard in this year’s recovery, but Texas Instruments is doing its best to change that. TI surged 6% after hours after beating and raising estimates. Earnings of 16 cents per share, adjusted for gains and charges, beat 9-cent estimates, and $2.53 billion revenues topped $2.44 billion forecasts. TI said […]

Max-Pain, the theory that stocks and indexes gravitate to the level where most options expire worthless, worked like a charm this week despite the volatile path it took to get there. A week ago, we wrote that Max-Pain for today’s options expiry was 34.50 on the QQQ; the Nasdaq 100 tracking stock closed just 11 […]

A market that had survived disappointing earnings from GE and IBM finally reached the breaking point on Friday. The culprits were eBay’s earnings warning for 2004, along with disappointing results from Sun , Xilinx , DoubleClick , Rambus and RSA . Even companies reporting strong results got smacked by profit-taking, among them Broadcom , PMC-Sierra […]