Stock futures continue to point to a higher open after the latest
round of consumer price data came in largely as expected. A separate
report, measuring business sentiment in New York, improved to neutral
for July for its highest reading in a year.
Stock futures have been solidly higher throughout pre-market
trading as an evening earnings beat from Intel (
) set the tone.
Intel (
) said Tuesday that Q2 revs were $8 bln, better than the
analyst mean of $7.28 bln on Thomson Reuters. Non-GAAP EPS was $0.18
per share, well ahead of the Street view of $0.08 per share. For Q3,
the company is guiding for revs of $8.5 bln, plus or minus $400 mln,
vs. Street estimates of $7.8 bln.
Elsewhere in the tech space, Juniper Networks (
) is up 2.6%
after Citigroup reportedly initiated new coverage on the stock with a
Buy rating.
Financial shares are also leaders. Goldman Sachs (
) is gaining
after an analyst upgrade this morning follows its earnings beat
Tuesday.
UBS (
), one of the banks hit hardest by the financial crisis,
sees "encouraging signs" for its second-quarter performance and is
proceeding as planned with efforts to reposition itself around its
private-bank and investment-banking arms, its chief executive said,
according to a Wall Street Journal story.
In the pharma space, Targacept (
) is up a sharp 80% after it
announced positive top-line results from a double blind, placebo
controlled, flexible dose Phase 2b clinical trial of TC-5214 as an
augmentation (add-on) treatment for major depressive disorder, or MDD,
in subjects who did not respond adequately to first-line treatment with
citalopram alone.
