Paul Shread

Investors battered by months of bad news about credit markets and the economy got good news from Intel late Tuesday when the chip giant met Wall Street estimates and predicted better times ahead. Intel’s earnings of 25 cents a share were in line with analysts’ expectations, as falling memory prices and flat microprocessor prices held […]

Investors braced for what will likely be a tough earnings season, sending stocks modestly lower Monday ahead of some key earnings reports. After disappointing results from AMD, GE, Wachovia and Philips Electronics, expectations are low heading into earnings reports from technology and financial bellwethers like Intel, IBM, Citigroup, Merrill Lynch and JP Morgan, all of […]

A surprising earnings miss from GE and the lowest consumer confidence reading in 26 years renewed recession fears on Friday and sent stocks plunging. A host of technology stocks got hit on the news that credit market turmoil had hit GE’s financial services business, which led to the company’s biggest earnings and sales shortfall in […]

Tech stocks outpaced their blue chip counterparts Thursday on an Intel upgrade and an intensifying battle for Yahoo. Intel and Yahoo gained 3% each to lead the Nasdaq’s 1.3% gain. The Dow and S&P were up less than 0.5%, as better than expected jobless claims were counterbalanced by weak retail sales. News of lower demand […]

IBM has acquired continuous data protection startup FilesX to add enterprise-class CDP to its storage software offerings. FilesX, based in Newton, Mass., and Haifa, Israel, specializes in CDP and near real-time data and application recovery software for enterprises and remote and branch offices. Financial terms of the deal, which is expected to close shortly, were […]

In a play on converged data center networks and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), Cisco is buying the 20 percent of Nuova Systems it doesn’t already own (see Cisco, Brocade See One Big Happy Fabric). At this week’s Storage Networking World conference in Orlando, Fla., Cisco also unveiled the Cisco Nexus 5000 Series, a product […]

The major indexes broke short-term uptrends today as they continue to remain stuck just below the key 12,743.2 level on the Dow (first chart below). On the plus side, sentiment remains remarkably bearish, with six straight weeks of more bears than bulls in the Investors Intelligence survey. Yet market bulls have been unable to use […]

Stocks fell again Wednesday, as a profit warning from UPS and dire assessments of the health of the economy kept investors on the defensive ahead of what will likely be a tough first-quarter earnings season. Former Fed chairman Paul Volcker and billionaire investor George Soros were the latest market luminaries to issue warnings about the […]

AMD and Alcoa got first-quarter earnings reports off to an unpromising start, but the surprise was that investors took the news fairly well. The major indexes ended the day down modestly despite a sales warning from AMD and an earnings miss from Dow component Alcoa, as traders continued to debate whether the Federal Reserve has […]

No change from a week ago: The Dow (first chart below) remains stuck just below its February high. If it can close at 12,743.2 or higher, it would confirm the Transports’ (second chart) close above its February high and generate a Dow Theory bull signal, reversing November’s bear signal and suggesting that the worst of […]

AMD got the first-quarter earnings reporting season off to a rough start late Monday by announcing lower-than-expected revenues and job cuts. AMD said it expects to report first-quarter sales of $1.5 billion, up 22% from the year-ago quarter, but less than the $1.62 billion that analysts expected. The chipmaker cited “lower than expected sales across […]

A second day of dismal labor market news did little to dent this week’s stock market rally, as investors continued to look past rising joblessness in hope that better times lie ahead. The major indexes ended Friday little changed despite news that the U.S. economy shed another 80,000 jobs last month, the worst monthly Labor […]