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NOTE TO EDITORS: The Following Is an Investment Opinion Being Issued by TheFortuneFinancial.com.

NOTE TO EDITORS: The Following Is an Investment Opinion Being Issued by Stock Market Alerts LLC.

Hewlett-Packard Co said a strong performance in China and improved profit margins in its services business helped drive quarterly earnings 14 percent higher. The fiscal fourth quarter results released on Monday were in line with those the company preannounced two weeks ago, which topped Wall Street's estimates.

Datel, a company selling memory units for Xbox 360 consoles, filed an antitrust suit against Microsoft for blocking unauthorized third party memory units. Microsoft claims innocence, as the block is meant to reduce cheating on Xbox Live, not reduce competition. Datel maintains that Microsoft is "disabling or erecting technological barriers...

Microsoft last week launched its first serious effort to build IT into its cloud plans by introducing technologies that help connect existing corporate networks and cloud services to make them look like a single infrastructure.

Computerworld - Microsoft today confirmed that exploit code published last week can compromise PCs running older versions of Internet Explorer IE, but said its security team has not yet seen any in-the-wild attacks. The attack code, which was posted Friday to the Bugtraq security mailing list, affects both Internet Explorer...

Microsoft responded to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof's assertion, made in a Nov. 20 column, that Bing offers pro-Chinese-government results for politically sensitive queries inputted in simplified Chinese. Microsoft now asserts that those results are related to what the company calls a "bug" that will be fixed soon, although...

Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) reported a strong quarter at the end of October on the back of resurgent demand in the PC market. But the key issue to watch is the important transition in the company’s major technologies. Microsoft just launched its very successful Windows 7 operating system, which has produced a major new ...

What is common among Twitter, IM, Skype, Facebook, Google Docs, and Email?[More...]

Markets generally adopted a slightly more defensive tone on Friday. In the US, utilities and consumer stables managed small gains, but financials, consumer cyclicals and IT fell.[More...]

Insider stock transactions – the buying and selling of stock by corporate “insiders” – won’t tell you where the overall stock market is headed. But the analysis of this type of legal insider trading can be a handy indicator when it comes to making buy and sell decisions on individual stocks.[More...]

• A large run of holiday sales offerings crashed the Ebay (NASDAQ:EBAY) website, causing a major weekend web outage

• Tyson Foods (NYSE:TSN) reported better-than-expected earnings of 28 cents a share, beating Zacks estimates by 2 cents, on revenues of $7.2 billion, which exceeded Zacks estimates of $6.85 billion

• India’s Reliance Industries bid $12 billion in cash for Lyondell Bassell when it exits bankruptcy

• Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) is reportedly in discussions with News Corp. (NASDAQ:NWSA) to "de-index" the firm's news websites from Google (NASDAQ:GOOG)

• Coca-Cola (NYSE:KO) announced plans to more than double the number of its bottling plants in China over the next ten years as part of its goal to triple sales to the country

• Hershey (NYSE:HSY) trust encouraged the firm to counter Kraft's (NYSE:KFT) hostile, $16.2 billion bid with its own, $17 billion offer

• According to S&P most US banks are failing to meet adequacy standards comfortably enough to avoid ratings downgrades. Both HSBC (NYSE:HBC) and Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS) showed stronger-than-average balance sheets, with UBS (NYSE:UBS) and Citigroup (NYSE:C) well below average

Zacks Investment Research

Two Veteran Wall Street Analysts discuss: (Vern): EXPW, INTU, MANT; (Val): CPWR, FICO, MSFT

We are carefully entering portfolio positions in this environment. (Note: Portfolio positions vs. trading positions) A company that we like for its specialty product is Cubist Pharmaceuticals (CBST). It has made all of our screens recently, but we were reluctant to add it to portfolios as the very recent trends have been down, down, down.  [...] Related posts:

1. Apple (AAPL) Earnings – Quick Notes
2. Allegiant (ALGT) – October YoY Comps Are Strong
3. Video: NYT Walt Mossberg Raves about Microsoft (MSFT) Windows 7

Schaeffer's analyst Morgan Searcy takes a look at news on the Street before the market open.

Schaeffer's analyst Morgan Searcy takes a look at news on the Street before the market open.

Tom Dorsey and Sue Morrison - Alternatives in the Red Zone