Flat To Lower Opening
Stocks appear set to open flat to
lower Friday.
Petco Animal Supplies priced its IPO
at $19 a share. The managers of the deal will be Merrill Lynch and Morgan
Stanley.
Dell Computers
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DELL |
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PowerRating) has been
awarded a contract to provide 60,000 notebooks, workstations and desktops to
German company BASF AG
(
BF |
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PowerRating) over the next three years.
Canada-based Rogers Wireless
Communications
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RCN |
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PowerRating) reported a Q4 loss of $63.5 million Canadian, or
45 Canadian cents, compared to a loss of $58.4 million Canadian, or 48 Canadian
cents, for the same quarter a year ago.
Oil refiner Tesoro Petroleum
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TSO |
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PowerRating)
said it plans to make a public offering of 20 million shares. The public
offering will be used to help pay for the acquisitions from Valero Energy
(
VLO |
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PowerRating).
TSO is buying an oil refinery and 70 retail gas outlets in California from VLO.
Nextel Communications
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downgraded by Salomon Smith Barney from Outperform to Neutral due to mixed Q4
results.
CoorTek
(
CRTK |
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Wells Fargo Securities from Buy to Market Perform.
JP Morgan downgraded General Dynamics
(
GD |
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PowerRating) from Long Term Buy to Market Perform after the company moved past the
firm’s price target of $90.
Prudential upgraded MicroChip
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PowerRating)
from Hold to Buy based on valuation.
CIBC downgraded JDS Uniphase
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PowerRating)
from Buy to Hold.
Merrill Lynch upgraded Autodesk
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ADSK |
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PowerRating)
from Buy to Near Term Strong Buy citing growth in a number of different product
groups.
ABN Amro downgraded Liz Claiborne
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LIZ |
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PowerRating)
from Add to Hold based on valuation.
JP Morgan upgraded Xilinx
(
XLNX |
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PowerRating)
and Altera
(
ALTR |
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PowerRating) from Market Perform to Long Term Buy.