Welcome to earnings season
The launch of earnings season started on Tuesday with Alcoa Inc.’s (AA) earnings report, although it wasn’t greeted with much enthusiasm. Shares of AA dropped after the company missed earning expectations by a penny per share.
Tough road ahead for Sprint
Sprint Nextel Corp. (S) faces some serious challenges as unhappy customers, dissatisfied investors and softening sales are just some of the problems that plague the company. Most problems can be traced back to Sprint’s $35 billion acquisition of Nextel.
Battle of the Internet behemoths
Will Google Inc.’s (GOOG) rise ever end? For the same price of 22 shares of Yahoo Inc (YHOO) one can purchase 1 share of GOOG.
Refiners’ club
Valero Energy Inc. (VLO), Chevron Corp. ( CVX), ConocoPhillips (COP) and Marathon Oil Corp. ( MRO) stock price were all faced with investors taking profit. Because raw materials for these companies keep inching higher, average gasoline prices have been falling. This combination will be trouble for the company
BEA learns lessons from past tussles with Oracle
The last time Oracle Corp. (ORCL) made an unsolicited bid for a company, the chief executive of the target firm compared Larry Ellison to Genghis Khan and called his team a bunch of sociopaths. In quickly rejecting Oracle’s unsolicited bid as too low, San Jose, Calif.-based BEA Systems Inc. (BEAS) issued a concise, unemotional statement with a carefully worded disclaimer. Read more.
Dreamliner deferred
Boeing Co. (BA) said that deliveries of its 787 Dreamliner would be delayed by six months. The first flight is now expected to take off near the end of the first quarter.
A decade of gains
Only 10 stock funds have had positive returns since 1977. While they’ve occasionally lagged behind the market, investors haven’t lost any money over the past decade — and that’s no easy feat.
A little sibling for Cubes
Nasdaq Stock Market Inc.’s (NDAQ) new Q-50 index, made up of companies poised to enter the Nasdaq-100 index ($NDX), is the benchmark for the $21 billion PowerShares QQQ Trust (QQQQ). A smaller-cap sibling ETF may also be released in the future.
Buying more risk
Companies such as Merrill Lynch & Co. (MER), Citigroup Inc. ( C), Deutsche Bank AG ( DB) and Morgan Stanley (MS) have all announced big write-downs, and as a result companies saw their stocks rise in the aftermath.
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