Monday, May 21, 2012


Stocks to Watch: Facebook, BlackRock, Yahoo! 


NEW YORK -- Facebook(FB) shares didn't get that massive pop many investors had hoped for on Friday, closing fractionally higher in the social networker's debut as a public company.
After the IPO was priced at $38 a share late on Thursday, the stock opened at $42.05 at roughly 11:30 a.m. EDT on Friday. The shares briefly jumped to a high of $45 before running down toward their pricing level. The stock closed at $38.23.
The CEO of Nasdaq OMX Group on Sunday acknowledged technology problems related to Facebook's listing on Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported. Nasdaq came under fire after trading in Facebook shares was delayed by 30 minutes on Friday.
Shares of Facebook ticked up a penny, or 0.02%, to $38.24 in premarket trading Monday.
Barclays(BCS) said Monday that it is planning to sell its $6.1 billion stake in BlackRock(BLK).
Barclays holds a 19.6% stake in the asset-management company
BlackRock shares were down $1.41, or 0.82%, to $170.50 in premarket trading Monday.
Yahoo! (YHOO) reached a deal to sell up to half of its stake in Alibaba back to the Chinese e-commerce company for about $7.1 billion.
The two companies announced the deal late Sunday.
If Alibaba purchases half of the stake for $7.1 billion, it will pay at least $6.3 billion in cash and up to $800 million worth of newly issued Alibaba preferred stock, the companies said.
The deal sets up a framework for Yahoo! to eventually monetize all of its Alibaba stake.
Yahoo! shares rose 6.68% to $16.45 in premarket trading Monday.
Lowe's(LOW) , the home-improvement retailer, reported first-quarter earnings Monday of $527 million, or 43 cents a share, up from year-earlier earnings of $461 million, or 34 cents.
Lowe's first-quarter sales were $13.2 billion, up from $12.2 billion the prior year.
Lowe's was expected by analysts to post a first-quarter profit of 42 cents a share on sales of almost $13 billion.
The company said it expects same-store sales to rise between 1% and 3% in fiscal 2012 and to open 10 stores during the year.
The largest operator of kidney dialysis centers in the U.S., DaVita(DVA), said Monday that it has agreed to buy HealthCare Partners, which operates medical groups several states in the U.S., for $4.4 billion.
Earnings reports also are expected Monday from Tech Data(TECD) and Urban Outfitters(URBN).

Alexandra Zendrian

05/21/12 - 07:36 AM EDT

-- Written by Joseph Woelfel
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)