Paul Shread

The S&P 500 (see chart below) broke a three-day trading range to the downside today and continued on through its 200-day average. The best hope for the bulls at this point is that 1466 holds, which would match the mid-October decline off the Oct. 31 high. If that goes, 1440-1450 should prove strong support. Seasonality […]

With key sectors like semiconductors and financials in bear markets, strength in big-cap technology stocks like Cisco, Microsoft, Apple and Google has kept the Nasdaq near multi-year highs even as the rest of the stock market has crumbled around them. So investors will look to Cisco’s quarterly results after the market close Wednesday for evidence […]

Storage virtualization continues to evolve, with Hitachi Data Systems and 3PAR the latest to push the technology in new directions. Hitachi added another chapter to its virtualization story by extending the thin provisioning feature of its high-end Universal Storage Platform V to externally attached storage systems from other vendors. HDS also added support for SATA […]

Sun Microsystems reported quarterly earnings late Monday that met Wall Street estimates, but the company’s sales came up short of forecasts. Net income was $89 million, or 3 cents a share, meeting estimates and reversing a year-ago loss of $56 million. Sales were up 1% from the year-ago quarter to $3.22 billion, but that was […]

Dell made a bold move into the SMB storage market today by coughing up $1.4 billion for iSCSI vendor EqualLogic — a move that could have ramifications for Dell partner EMC. The move comes less than three months after EqualLogic filed for an IPO. EqualLogic has more than doubled sales annually since 2004. Enterprise Strategy […]

A much stronger than expected jobs report that showed little in the way of wage pressures did little to right the struggling financial sector on Friday, but strength in the tech sector eventually dragged blue chip stocks higher by the close. The banking sector ended the day 1.6% lower on weakness in Merrill Lynch and […]

The S&P 500 (first chart below) found support just above our 1482-1489 level and ended the day with a slight gain. A good start after a retest of the low of two weeks ago, but 1512 and 1530 are two big initial hurdles to the upside. But with stocks entering the strongest months of the […]

Just a day after the Federal Reserve said it sees no reason to continue cutting interest rates, an analyst’s assertion that Citigroup could face a $30 billion shortfall because of credit market losses reminded investors that the credit market crisis remains far from over. The result was a 7% drop in shares of Citigroup, a […]

The banking sector’s troubles caught up with the market again today. We’d note that a similar decline two weeks ago reversed the next day; will the market be as lucky this time? The answer could lie in how the S&P 500 handles the support range it is nearing (see first chart below). If the S&P […]

Stocks posted strong gains Wednesday after the Federal Reserve cut interest rates by a quarter point but suggested that it was done cutting rates for now. The Fed gave the market the rate cut it expected, but in its accompanying policy statement, central bankers said that growth will likely slow because of the housing market […]

Little has changed from our last update a week ago: the market put in a credible bottom just in time for the strongest part of the year historically and has built on that base nicely since. But with sentiment mixed, the Nasdaq and S&P facing some critical tests and some key indexes continuing to lag, […]

Blue chip stocks fell Tuesday on slowdown fears and jitters ahead of the Federal Reserve’s decision on interest rates. Blue chip stocks were underwater all day as traders fretted that the Fed might not cut rates at all on Wednesday after a Wall Street Journal article raised doubts, but the selling accelerated late in the […]