Stocks were rising Wednesday as Wall Street looked ahead to U.S. inflation data and the start of corporate earnings season later this week.
These stocks were making moves Wednesday:
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
reached an agreement to acquire
Juniper Networks
for about $14 billion. HPE will pay $40 a share in cash for Juniper, a roughly 32% premium to where the stock traded before The Wall Street Journal reported a deal was in the works. HPE said the deal would double the size of its profitable networking business, and “supercharges HPE’s edge-to-cloud strategy with an ability to lead in an AI-native environment.” Juniper shares rose 2% to $37.53 after soaring 22% on Tuesday. HPE was up 1.1%.
Intuitive Surgical
was up 8.4% after the maker of robotic surgical equipment said it expected fourth-quarter sales of $1.93 billion, higher than analysts’ expectations of $1.87 billion. The company said worldwide procedures with its da Vinci robotic surgical system rose 21% in the fourth quarter from a year earlier.
Meta Platforms,
the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, had its price target raised at Mizuho Securities to $470 from $400. The analysts reiterated their Buy rating, saying that the stock could be driven higher over the next few months by a conservative consensus for sales growth, guidance on reduced operating expenditures, and the WhatsApp messaging service increasing its revenue base by a third with the help of artificial intelligence.
Meta
shares rose 3.8% to $371.15.
Aehr Test Systems
was falling 15% after the company said the slowing sales growth rate of the electric-vehicle market was having a “negative impact on the timing of several current and new customer orders and capacity increases for silicon carbide devices used in them.” The company, which makes test systems for sensors and semiconductors, reduced revenue guidance for the fiscal year to between $75 million to $85 million, down from its previous expectations of $100 million.
WD-40,
the maintenance and cleaning products company, posted fiscal first-quarter earnings and sales that rose from a year earlier. Sales jumped 12% to $140.4 million. Shares rose 14%.
Smart Global
was up 12% after the computing and memory company company reported adjusted earnings in its fiscal first quarter of 24 cents a share, beating analysts’ estimates of 16 cents. The company reported record non-GAAP gross margin of 33.3% in the period, up from a year earlier.
Home Depot
was upgraded by analysts at Wedbush to Outperform from Neutral, with the firm saying that weak home-improvement retail demand from last year was “bottoming or reversing, which should translate to stronger demand in 2024. The stock was up 1.8% to $352.55.
Etsy
declined 2.4% to $74.99 after the stock was cut to Neutral from Buy at
Goldman Sachs
and the price target was reduced to $80 from $84.
TG Therapeutics
was down 19%. The biopharmaceutical company said it was targeting U.S. net product revenue of $220 million to $260 million for its multiple sclerosis treatment Briumvi in 2024.
Lennar
was rising 2.8% after the home builder raised its annual dividend by 33% to $2 a share, and said its board authorized a $5 billion increase to its stock buyback program.
Home builder
KB Home
is scheduled to issue quarterly earnings after the closing bell Wednesday.
Write to Joe Woelfel at [email protected]
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