With the broad-based S&P 500 (SNPINDEX: ^GSPC ) getting a short break from big economic news, investors looked to earnings reports to fuel today's trading action. Not surprisingly, it was mixed.
Since earnings season began, the financial sector has been the real standout, with credit quality improving, loan amounts growing, and cost-cutting helping to drastically improve the bottom line for many of the nation's largest banks. However, all eyes today turned to technology juggernaut Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL ) which is set to report its third-quarter results after the bell. Known for its notoriously conservative guidance, Apple has missed EPS estimates in two of the past four quarters, and shareholders have watched as most Wall Street analysts have cut growth targets on the tech giant one-by-one. Having such a large bearing on the S&P 500 in terms of weighting, it's not surprising to see both Apple and the index hovering around the flat-line.
By the end of a very earnings-mixed day, the S&P 500 had dipped by 3.14 points to close at 1,692.39. But what you'll notice is that the majority of today's biggest movers to the upside were commodity-based companies such as coal, iron ore, steel, and copper, which are benefiting from a bounce in underlying commodity prices and the hope that China's economy will stabilize and quickly return to its 30-year average of 10% GDP growth.
Top Consumer Service Stocks To Own For 2015: Koppers Holdings Inc (KOP)
Koppers Holdings Inc. (Koppers), incorporated on November 12, 2004,is a global provider of carbon compounds and commercial wood treatment products and services. The Company's products are used in a variety of niche applications in a diverse range of end-markets, including the aluminum, railroad, specialty chemical, utility, concrete and steel industries. The Company serves its customers through a global manufacturing and distribution networks, with manufacturing facilities located in the United States, Australia, China, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Denmark. The Company operates in two business segments: Carbon Materials & Chemicals and railroads & Utility Products.
The Company's operations are, to a substantial extent, vertically integrated. Through the Company's Carbon Materials & Chemicals business, the Company processes coal tar into a variety of products, including carbon pitch, creosote, naphthalene and phthalic anhydride, which are intermediate materials necessary in the production of aluminum, the pressure treatment of wood, the production of high-strength concrete, and the production of plasticizers and specialty chemicals, respectively. Through the Company's Railroad & Utility Products business, the Company believes that the Company is thesupplier of railroad crossties to the North American railroads.
Carbon Materials & Chemicals
Carbon pitch, naphthalene, and creosote are produced through the distillation of coal tar, a by-product generated through the processing of coal into coke for use in steel and iron manufacturing. Coal tar distillation involves the conversion of coal tar into a variety of intermediate chemical products in processes beginning with distillation. During the distillation process, heat and vacuum are utilized to separate coal tar into three primary components: carbon pitch (approximately 50%), chemical oils (approximately 20%) and creosote (approximately 30%).
The Company's Carbon Materials & Chemicals business! (CM&C) manufactures principal products, including carbon pitch, a critical raw material used in the production of aluminum and steel; naphthalene, used for the production of phthalic anhydride and as a surfactant in the production of concrete; phthalic anhydride, used in the production of plasticizers, polyester resins and alkyd paints, and creosote and carbon black feedstock, used in the treatment of wood or as a feedstock in the production of carbon black. The Company also uses naphthalene as a feedstock in the manufacture of phthalic anhydride. The primary markets for phthalic anhydride are in the production of plasticizers, unsaturated polyester resins and alkyd resins. The Company is a producer of carbon pitch for the aluminum industry.
Creosote is used as a commercial wood treatment chemical to preserve railroad crossties and lumber, utility poles and piling. The majority of the Company's domestically produced creosote is sold to its Railroad & Utility Products business. In Australia, China and Europe, creosote is sold primarily into the carbon black market for use as a feedstock in the production of carbon black. In Europe and China creosote is also sold to wood treaters. The Company's wood treating plants in the United States purchase substantially all of their creosote from the Company's tar distillation plants.
Other products include the sale of refined tars, benzole and specialty chemicals. The Company's CM&C business manufactures its primary products and sells them directly to the Company's global customer base under long-term contracts or through purchase orders negotiated by its regional sales personnel and coordinated through its global marketing group in the United States. The Company's nine coal tar distillation facilities including joint ventures and four carbon materials terminals give the Company the ability to offer customers multiple sourcing and a consistent supply of products.
Railroad & Utility Products
The Company's Railroad ! & Utility! Products business (R&UP) sells treated and untreated wood products, rail joint bars and services primarily to the railroad and public utility markets in the United States and Australia. The Company also produces concrete crossties, a complementary product to its wood treatment business, through a joint venture in the United States.
Railroad products include procuring and treating items such as crossties, switch ties and various types of lumber used for railroad bridges and crossings. Railroad products also include manufacturing and selling rail joint bars, which are steel bars used to join rails together for railroads. Utility products include transmission and distribution poles for electric and telephone utilities and piling used in industrial foundations, beach housing, docks and piers. The R&UP business operates 13 wood treating plants, one rail joint bar manufacturing facility, one co-generation facility and 13 pole distribution yards located throughout the United States and Australia. The Company's network of plants is strategically located near timber supplies to enable the Company to access raw materials and service customers effectively. In addition, the Company's crosstie treating plants are typically adjacent to its railroad customers' track lines, and its pole distribution yards are typically located near its utility customers.
In the United States, hardwood lumber is procured by the Company from hundreds of small sawmills throughout the northeastern, midwestern and southern areas of the country. The crossties are shipped via rail car or trucked directly to one of the Company's crosstie treating plants, all of which are on line with a railroad. The crossties are either air-stacked for a period of six to twelve months or artificially dried by a process called boultonizing. Once dried, the crossties are pressure treated with creosote, a product of the Company's CM&C business.
The Company's R&UP business' customer base is the North American Class I railroa! d market,! which buys approximately 80% of all crossties produced in the United States and Canada. The Company also has relationships with many of the approximately 550 short-line and regional rail lines. This also forms the customer base for the Company's rail joint bar products. The railroad crosstie market is a mature market with approximately 23 million replacement crossties (both wood and non-wood) purchased during 2012. The Company supplies all seven of the North American Class I railroads and have contracts with six of them. The Company treats poles with a variety of preservatives, including pentachlorophenol, copper chrome arsenates and creosotes .In the United States the market for utility pole products is characterized by a number of small producers selling into a price-sensitive industry. The utility pole market is fragmented domestically, with over 200 investor-owned electric and telephone utilities and 2,900 smaller municipal utilities and rural electric associations.
Advisors' Opinion:- [By Jeremy Bowman]
What: Shares of Koppers Holdings (NYSE: KOP ) were looking rusty today, falling as much as 12% after the company cut its outlook for the current quarter.
Top Quality Stocks To Buy Right Now: NetApp Inc.(NTAP)
NetApp, Inc. engages in the design, manufacturing, marketing, and technical support of networked storage solutions. It supplies enterprise storage and data management software, and hardware products and services. The company offers Data ONTAP, an operating system that supports storage area network (SAN) and network-attached storage (NAS) environments; storage efficiency technologies, including FlexVol, FlexClone, and Deduplication technologies; storage management and application integration software, such as OnCommand management software; fabric-attached storage unified storage systems, which support a range of data for users on various platforms; and virtual storage tier; V-Series network-based virtualization solutions that provide SAN and NAS access to the data stored in heterogeneous storage arrays. It also provides data protection software products, including Snapshot, SnapRestore, SnapVault, and Open Systems SnapVault techologies; MetroCluster products; and SnapMirror data replication solution. In addition, the company offers data retention and archive products, and Flash Cache modules; and storage security products for data security and key management in IP SAN, NAS, and tape backup environments; StorageGRID that enables intelligent data management and secure content retention; and professional services, global support solutions, and customer education and training. It serves energy, financial services, government, high technology, Internet, life sciences and healthcare services, manufacturing, media, entertainment, animation and video postproduction, and telecommunications industries. It offers its products in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the Asia Pacific, and Japan. The company was formerly known as Network Appliance, Inc. and changed its name to NetApp, Inc. in March 2008. NetApp, Inc. was founded in 1992 and is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California.
Advisors' Opinion:- [By Selena Maranjian]
Finally, Eminence Capital's biggest closed positions included EMC (NYSE: EMC ) and NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP ) . Storage giant EMC has been tapping the bond market, borrowing $5.5 billion to help it repurchase close to 10% of its shares. It has also initiated a dividend, recently yielding 1.6%. Many see it poised to gain from the rapidly growing cloud-computing and "Big Data" arenas, and it holds an 80% ownership stake in virtualization specialist VMware, too. EMC has been posting strong numbers and, in many ways, outpacing its smaller rival NetApp.
- [By Laura Brodbeck]
Wednesday
Earnings Expected From: Macy�� Inc. (NYSE: M), Millennial Media, Inc. (NYSE: MM), NetApp, Inc. (NASDAQ: NTAP) Economic Releases Expected: Spanish CPI, British unemployment rate, eurozone industrial production, US Federal budget balance, Japanese industrial productionThursday
- [By rusticnomad]
Its peer NetApp (NTAP) specializes in IT-enabled business solutions such as data security, cloud solutions, and data management systems. However, it posted a weak performance in the recently declared quarter. Also, its growth prospects do not look very enticing as it registered net revenue of $1.71 billion, a marginal increase of 0.8% from the previous quarter.
- [By Jake L'Ecuyer]
NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) was also down, dropping 2.28 percent to $36.14 after UBS released a bearish report on the company.
Commodities
In commodity news, oil traded down 0.04 percent to $103.71, while gold traded up 0.18 percent to $1,302.40.
Top Quality Stocks To Buy Right Now: Cadence Pharmaceuticals Inc.(CADX)
Cadence Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a biopharmaceutical company, focuses on acquiring, in-licensing, developing, and commercializing proprietary product candidates principally for use in the hospital setting in the United States and Canada. It holds rights to OFIRMEV injection, a proprietary intravenous formulation of acetaminophen for the management of pain and reduction of fever in adults and children. The company in-licenses rights to OFIRMEV from Bristol-Myers Squibb Company, which sells intravenous acetaminophen in Europe and other markets for the treatment of acute pain and fever under the Perfalgan brand name. Cadence Pharmaceuticals, Inc. was founded in 2004 and is headquartered in San Diego, California.
Advisors' Opinion:- [By Paul Ausick]
Stocks on the Move: Zulily Inc. (NASDAQ: ZU) is up 71.4% at $37.70 after its IPO today. Cadence Pharmaceuticals Inc. (NASDAQ: CADX) is up 33.8% at $7.87 on a patent ruling. Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ: EA) is down 7.4% at $24.04.
- [By Jake L'Ecuyer]
Equities Trading UP
Cadence Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: CADX) shot up 26.42 percent to $14.02 after Mallinckrodt plc (NYSE: MNK) announced its plans to acquire Cadence Pharma for $14.00 per share in cash.
Top Quality Stocks To Buy Right Now: Mattson Technology Inc.(MTSN)
Mattson Technology, Inc. engages in the design, manufacture, marketing, and support of semiconductor wafer processing equipment used in the fabrication of integrated circuits for the semiconductor industry worldwide. Its dry strip products include the SUPREMA strip system that incorporates its inductively coupled plasma (ICP) technology photoresist process module, and vacuum-based productivity platform for processing of sub 30 nm devices. The company?s rapid thermal processing products include the Helios and Helios XP systems for conventional annealing applications, and the Millios system for millisecond anneal applications. Its etch products comprise the paradigmE and Alpine that feature a proprietary Faraday-shielded ICP with etch bias control to provide process on-wafer performance. The company sells its products directly, as well as through distribution agreements to foundries, and memory and logic device manufacturers. Mattson Technology, Inc. was founded in 1988 and is headquartered in Fremont, California.
Advisors' Opinion:- [By Stephen Simpson, CFA]
Ultratech isn't the only game in town, though, and there are multiple technologies and process steps that are going to play significant roles in the production of FinFETs and 3D circuits. With that, I would take a look at Mattson Technologies (MTSN), as this company has already accomplished the not-so-easy task of gaining meaningful share in the dry strip, rapid thermal processing (RTP), and etch markets despite competing with giants like Lam Research (LRCX), Applied Materials (AMAT), and Tokyo Electron (TOELY.PK).
- [By Roberto Pedone]
Mattson Technology (MTSN) designs, manufactures and markets semiconductor wafer processing equipment used in the fabrication of integrated circuits. This stock closed up 5.1% to $2.25 in Tuesday's trading session.
Tuesday's Range: $2.15-$2.30
52-Week Range: $0.70-$2.55
Tuesday's Volume: 593,000
Three-Month Average Volume: 825,998From a technical perspective, MTSN bounced higher here back above its 50-day moving average at $2.23 with lighter-than-average volume. It looks like MTSN has now put in a double bottom chart pattern, since the stock has found some buying interest over the last month at $2.05 to $2.07. If that bottom can hold, then shares of MTSN will not set up to trigger a major breakout trade. That trade will hit if MTSN manages to take out some near-term overhead resistance levels at $2.40 to $2.52 and then once it clears its 52-week high at $2.55 with high volume.
Traders should now look for long-biased trades in MTSN as long as it's trending above $2.07 to $2.05 and then once it sustains a move or close above those breakout levels with volume that hits near or above 825,998 shares. If that breakout hits soon, then MTSN will set up to enter new 52-week-high territory, which is bullish technical price action. Some possible upside targets off that breakout are its next major overhead resistance levels at $3.17 to its three-year high at $3.30.
Top Quality Stocks To Buy Right Now: Nestle SA (NESN)
Nestle SA is a Swiss Company engaged in the nutrition, health and wellness sectors. It is the holding company of the Nestle Group, which comprises subsidiaries, associated companies and joint ventures throughout the world. It has such business units as Food and Beverage, Nestle Waters and Nestle Nutrition. It is also active in the pharmaceutical sector. It divides its products into Powdered and liquid beverages, Water, Milk products and Ice cream, Nutrition, Prepared dishes and cooking aids, Confectionery, PetCare and Pharmaceutical products. In February 2011, the Company acquired CM&D Pharma Ltd. Advisors' Opinion:- [By Corinne Gretler]
Swiss stocks fell for a second day, their first back-to-back losses this month, as Nestle (NESN) SA retreated after reporting slower growth in sales.
- [By Chad Fraser]
These are the first significant moves made by the Caira, a former executive at Nestle SA (NYSE: NESN) who helped expand that company’s hot and cold beverage division.
- [By Celeste Perri]
Nestle SA (NESN) is selling Givaudan (GIVN) SA shares worth $1.27 billion at yesterday�� closing price to institutional investors, winding down its stake in the world�� largest flavorings maker.
Top Quality Stocks To Buy Right Now: Urban Outfitters Inc.(URBN)
Urban Outfitters Inc. operates lifestyle specialty retail stores under the Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie, Free People, Terrain, and BHLDN brand names in the United States, Canada, and Europe. Its Urban Outfitters stores sell women?s and men?s fashion apparel, footwear, accessories, and gifts, as well as apartment wares, such as rugs, pillows, shower curtains, books, candles, and novelties to young adults aged 18 to 28; and Anthropologie stores provide women?s casual apparel and accessories, shoes, gifts, and decorative items, as well as home furnishings, including furniture, rugs, lighting, antiques, table top items, and bedding to women aged 28 to 45. The company?s Free People stores primarily offer Free People branded merchandise mix of casual women?s apparel, intimates, shoes, accessories, and gifts to young contemporary women aged 25 to 30; Terrain store provides lifestyle home and garden products, antiques, live plants, flowers, wellness products, and accessori es, as well as landscape and design service solutions; and BHLDN store offers a range of weeding collections consisting of wedding gowns, bridesmaid frocks, party dresses, assorted jewelry, headpieces, footwear, lingerie, and decorations. As of January 31, 2012, it operated 197 Urban Outfitters stores, 168 Anthropologie stores, 62 Free People stores, 1 Terrain garden center, and 1 BHLDN store. The company also operates a wholesale business under the Free People brand name that distributes apparel to other retailers and department stores in the United States. In addition, it markets its brands directly to consumers through its e-commerce Websites, including urbanoutfitters.com, anthropologie.com, freepeople.com, urbanoutfitters.co.uk, urbanoutfitters.de, urbanoutfitters.fr, anthropologie.eu, shopterrain.com, and bhldn.com, as well as through its Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie, and Free People catalogs. The company was founded in 1970 and is based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvani a.
Advisors' Opinion:- [By Dan Moskowitz]
Urban Outfitters (NASDAQ: URBN ) is another similar player. However, it targets a wider array of consumers through its various brand stores, including Urban Outfitters (18-28 demographic), Free People (25-30), and Anthropologie (28-45). Like Express, Urban Outfitters is slowly expanding its store base. Also like Express, Urban Outfitters saw an impressive earnings improvement in the second quarter. In this case, EPS increased 21% to $0.51 thanks to optimized inventory and lower merchandise markdowns.
- [By Monica Gerson]
Urban Outfitters (NASDAQ: URBN) is expected to post its Q4 earnings at $0.55 per share on revenue of $927.86 million.
Resolute Energy (NYSE: REN) is projected to report its Q4 earnings at $0.04 per share on revenue of $89.46 million.
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