Paul Shread

Stocks suffered their steepest decline in more than two months Thursday after a pair of employment reports came in weaker than expected. A loss of 33,000 private sector jobs reported by ADP, along with an unexpected jump in weekly jobless claims, painted a grim picture of the job market ahead of the U.S. Labor Department’s […]

3PAR (NYSE: PAR) has upped the performance of its storage servers while boosting capacity utilization. Craig Nunes, 3PAR’s vice president of marketing, said that by building thin provisioning into its third-generation ASICs, the company was able to boost performance while maintaining high capacity utilization. “You don’t have to trade off performance for good capacity utilization,” […]

The tech sector had a number of names making news on Wednesday, and none of it seemed to be good. Corning (NYSE: GLW) tumbled 12.6% after lowering its third-quarter forecast because of lower-than-expected LCD glass shipments. Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) fell 3.7% after reporting slowing cell phone sales, which also hit shares of Texas Instruments (NYSE: […]

September is off to a good start if it is intent on keeping its century-old record as the worst month for stocks. But don’t write off the month just yet. Exhibit A (first chart below) in the bullish case is the NYSE advance-decline line, which hit a new high last week with no help from […]

A steep plunge in oil prices was good news for the stock market for all of about 30 minutes on Tuesday. The major stock indexes posted gains of around 2% in the first 15 minutes of trading on relief that energy supplies weren’t more disrupted by Hurricane Gustav, but they spent the rest of the […]

Stocks posted strong gains for a second day on Thursday, but Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) threatened to undo the rally after the close when the company posted disappointing quarterly results. Dell’s 11 percent sales growth to $16.4 billion was nearly $500 million above estimates, but the company’s earnings of 33 cents a share were three cents […]

A stronger than expected durable goods report and another day of gains in battered mortgage stocks had investors in a good mood on Wednesday. Technology investors are hoping the good mood carries over into Thursday night, when Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) will report its quarterly results. Investors and analysts will be looking for signs that the […]

The Dow and S&P (first two charts below) are winding up in a tight trading range here. Which way will they break? On the plus side, both indexes are holding some semblance of a rising channel, which holds the possibility of further gains. But both have been stymied at a downtrend line off the highs […]

A number of downgrades weighed on the Nasdaq on Tuesday, as slowdown fears held the tech sector back even as blue chip shares managed modest gains. Marvell (NASDAQ: MRVL) lost 6.6% in heavy volume after Jefferies & Co. downgraded the stock on concern about slowing growth and the possible loss of a Research In Motion […]

EMC (NYSE: EMC) has lowered the entry point for its wildly popular Celerra unified storage offerings. The new Celerra NX4 starts at $20,300, about $12,000 less than the fast-growing NS20. Users sacrifice a little performance and scalability for that price, but it also broadens the market for one of EMC’s most popular products. Brad Bunce, […]

Even on a day when the troubled financial sector got some good news, its shares still led the stock market lower. Better than expected existing home sales and a well received auction at Freddie Mac (NYSE: FRE) might have been good for a rally on another day, but major stock averages plunged 2% as investors […]

Better than expected results from Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) helped investors forget about troubles at Fannie Mae (NYSE: FNM) and Freddie Mac (NYSE: FRE) for a day. HP’s shares gained 5.7% even as shares of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac plunged more than 20% to the low single digits, as investors effectively began pricing in a […]