Monday Morning Coffee with TradingMarkets

Good Morning!

"No Country for Old Men" Wins Four Oscars... Electronic Arts Bids on Take-Two... Genentech Up Big in Pre-Market with Avastin News... VISA IPO Could Be Largest Ever in U.S.... Tiger Woods Wins Match Play Final... Lowe's Earning Beat Estimates, Guidance Disappoints... Ambac Up On Capital Infusion Rescue Rumors... Economists Insist Recession Likely in 2008.

Asian stocks up... European stocks up... Greenbacks moving higher against the yen... And the futures are trending lower in the hour before the bell.

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TradingMarkets 5 Business Stories You Need to Know

Electronic Arts Bids for Take-Two - Wall Street Journal
Electronics Arts $2 billion offer for Take-Two Interactive is the latest unsolicited bid in the world of technology. EA has bid $26 per share for the company, which has rejected the bid. EA's offer represents a 64% premium on the shares as of the February 15 close, and the company has said it will take its offer directly to shareholders.

Lowe's Beats, But Guidance Soft - Bloomberg
Weakness in the housing markets continues to impact revenues and earnings at Lowe's, one of the leading home improvement retailers. Earnings fell less than analyst projected, with Lowe's buoyed by price cuts and superior customer satisfaction compared to rival, Home Depot.

Do or Die Dollar? - DailyFX
Chief currency strategist Kathy Lien takes a look at the U.S. economy as a way of figuring out the dollar's next move. Will continued fears of economic weakness in the U.S. continue to drag the dollar lower? Or will the idea of a world-wide slowdown in growth actually help the U.S. dollar against other curencies?

Genentech's Avastin Wins Approval - TheStreet
Genentech, the largest producer of anti-cancer medicines in the United States, announced that it had won approval to market its breast cancer treatment, Avastin. The new drug could result in sales of more than $700 million in 2008.

VISA IPO May Be Biggest Ever - Wall Street Journal
If VISA goes through with its planned initial public offering, the sale of more than $17 billion in stock would make the IPO the largest ever in U.S. history. The company plans to sell 406 million shares priced between $37 and $42 each. In 2006, VISA completed nearly twice as many transactions as rival Mastercard.

For more stories as they happen, go to our Breaking News section.

TradingMarkets 7 Stocks You Need to Know for Today

Here are 7 stocks for traders for today from TradingMarkets.com:

• Home improvement retailer, Lowe's Companies (LOW | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating) reported Q4 earnings of $0.28.
  

• Nordstrom (JWN | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating), the fashion specialty retailer, is expected to report Q4 earnings of $0.88.
  

• Late on Friday, there was speculation that troubled bond insurer Ambac Financial (ABK | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating) is close to receiving a bailout.
  

• LDK Solar (LDK | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating) is expected to report Q4 earnings of $0.41.
  

• Analysts are looking for FirstEnergy (FE | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating), the electric utility holding company, to report Q4 earnings of $0.92.
  

• Drug development company, Human Genome Sciences (HGSI | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating) is expected to report a Q4 loss of -$0.49.
  

• And finally, do you think Yahoo! (YHOO | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating) will close up or down on Tuesday? Play TradingMarkets Up or Down Daily Stock Contest for the chance to win $1000 every month predicting the direction of a stock.
  

For a list of today’s highest PowerRating stocks, click here.

TradingMarkets 5 Top PowerRatings Stocks for Today

TradingMarkets Tracking the Wizards

UBS Magnus Warns of More Trouble to Come - Financial Times
Senior economic advisor for UBS, George Magnus sits down with the Financial Times for this three-part discussion of the possibility of a trillion dollar meltdown" as well as his contention that economic conditions will deteriorate to the point of the United States needing to create a bailout package for the financial sector by October.

A Goldman Stumble in March? - Wall Street Journal
Could Goldman Sachs incredible record of 10 consecutive quarters of ever higher year-over-year earnings per share finally come to an end?

Market Testing Wizards to the Rescue! - TradingMarkets
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TradingMarkets Playbook

The rally late in the day on Friday helped the market carve out a potential higher low vis-a-vis the lows from earlier in the month. Again, what is key is follow-through after the market managed to close nearer its highs on the last trading day of the week.

We are seeing a less severe ratio of overbought to oversold stocks in our TradingMarkets Stock Indicators this morning comapred to previous mornings, which suggests that the market will have room to move still higher before becoming dangerously overbought. The number of bargains for traders looking to the long side is not great. But the number of those stocks seems to have increased from last week.

It is worth noting that there has been a bullish tendency to the end of the month, as we have documented in our research at TradingMarkets. While this alone is no reason to become wildly bullish, it may be a reason--combined with other factors--for traders to forego aggressive shorting for the time being.

David Penn is Senior Editor at TradingMarkets.com.

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