THE DAY AHEAD: Stocks to Watch
The Linthicum, MD. telecommunications equipment maker won a contract from Cable & Wireless Plc. (NYSE: CWP) to provide equipment for its U.S. Internet network. Terms of the deal will be released at the Supercomm trade show later this week. Ciena rose 4 3/16 to 33 5/8.
Watch out eToys Inc. (Nasdaq: ETYS), Jeff Bezos has you in his sights. The online retailer moving towards opening an online toy store in about a month. Amazon also plans to offer free digital music downloads.
Amazon is building a reputation for raining on others' parades. Amazon is locking horns with the top online music seller CDNow Inc. (Nasdaq: CDNW) and earlier this year the retailer jumped into eBay Inc.'s (Nasdaq: EBAY) niche, the person-to-person online auction market.
eToys rose 4 3/8 to 53 5/16 and Amazon advanced 8 15/16 to 117 3/8.
If you couldn't tell by Infoseek's stock price yesterday, something big was going down. The Walt Disney Co. (NYSE: DIS) disclosed it is in negotiations buy the remaining 57 percent of Infoseek that it doesn't already own. Disney also said the chief of its Internet operations resigned.
How much will Disney shell out? That's hard to say. Disney doesn't have a ridiculously inflated share price that it can use as currency, but it does have a lot of cash. The price tag could be steep if past deals are any guide. At Home bought Excite Inc. (Nasdaq: XCIT) for $6.7 billion. So, if Disney paid the same price for the remaining 57 percent stake, it would write a check for about $2.8 billion.
Infoseek rose 6 5/16 to 43 and Disney added 1/4 to 30 7/8.
The data storage products maker agreed to buy closely held Vinca Corp. for $94 million in cash and stock. Vinca's products will add to Legato's data access line. Legato climbed 3 1/4 to 59 1/2.
The software giant asked Big Blue to stop selling competing software, and after it refused, the price IBM paid for Windows software soared, said an IBM executive in Microsoft's antitrust trial on Monday.
The legal questions to ask are: As a sanctioned monopoly, did Microsoft have the right to ask a competitor to stop competing? Was a threat implied that Microsoft would take action if it refused? Did the rise in price that IBM paid after refusing Microsoft's request have to do with the refusal? This is why court cases drag on forever.
At the very least, it's just a tad odd in business to walk over to the competition and ask them to give up.
Microsoft rose 11/16 to 80 1/4 and IBM climbed 4 1/2 to 120 1/2.
The world's largest database software company bought Thinking Machines Corp.'s data mining software business for undisclosed terms. Data mining is the quick retreival of arhived data from huge databases. Oracle dipped 3/16 to 28 1/2.