IPOs Still Hot–Here’s The Latest Winner…

  • August 11, 2005
  • Brice Wightman

Stocks are higher Thursday mid-session
despite $66 oil. The Dow is being propelled by Alcoa
(
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which was upgraded to ‘buy’ at UBS. The indices would be higher were it not for
an Intel
(
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downgraded at Goldman to in-line from outperform.

Retail sales for July rose +1.8%. ex-autos, +0.3%.
Jobless claims for the week ending 8/6 fell 6000 to 308,000. The 4-week
moving average fell 7250 to 309,250.

News Corp
(
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PowerRating) beat by 0.05; Q4 profit rose 67%. Deutsche Bank
upgraded the stock to ‘buy.’

Target
(
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also beat expectations at $11.99 billion. Same store sales rose 6.7%.

Refco (RFX)
offered stock to the public today–26.5 million shares at $22, above the $19-$21
range. The stock opened at $27. Refco raised $583 million on the
deal, with the company selling 12.5 million shares. Refco is a leading
derivatives, FX and fixed income broker. The lead underwriters were CSFB,
Goldman and Bank of America.

After the bell, look for earnings from Dell
(
DELL |
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PowerRating), which is expected to report 0.38. On average, analysts expect the
company to meet or slightly beat that estimate.

Strong sectors are:    Gold

(
XAU |
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(
XOI.X |
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PowerRating) +1.01%

Weak sectors are:   Airlines

(
XAL |
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(
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-0.22%    

Dow +28.98 10,623.39
Nasdaq +6.00 2163.81
S&P 500 +3.91 1233.04

Stocks in the news:

CV Theraputics
(
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primary endpoint its Phase 3 trial. The stock is trading higher pre-open.

Medtronic
(
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its glucose monitoring system Guardian for diabetics.

JP Morgan cut Novellus
(
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neutral from outperform.

Yahoo
(
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40% stake in Chinese online retailer Alibaba.

Brinker
(
EAT |
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PowerRating) beat by a penny and
guided higher for Q1.

Conoco Phillips
(
COP |
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additional $1 billion stock buyback.

AIG raised its quarterly dividend 20% to 0.15.

Brice Wightman