Stock Upgrades, Downgrades from TheStreet.com Ratings

Each business day, TheStreet.com Ratings updates its ratings on the stocks it covers. The proprietary ratings model projects a stock's total return potential over a 12-month period, including both price appreciation and dividends. Buy, hold or sell ratings designate how the Ratings group expects these stocks to perform against a general benchmark of the equities market and interest rates.

While the ratings model is quantitative, it uses both subjective and objective elements. For instance, subjective elements include expected equities market returns, future interest rates, implied industry outlook and company earnings forecasts. Objective elements include volatility of past operating revenue, financial strength and company cash flows.

Electronics giantSony(SNE) has been upgraded to buy. The company maintains a largely solid financial position with reasonable debt levels by most measures, with a solid stock-price performance, and impressive growth in revenue, EPS and net income. These strengths should outweigh the company's weak operating cash flow. Fiscal-year second-quarter earnings soared to $679 million, up from $4 million a year ago. Sales climbed 12.3% to $18.27 billion. The company has demonstrated a pattern of positive EPS growth over the past year, and this trend is expected to continue. This stock has surged 35.42% over the past year. Although almost any stock can fall in a broad market decline, Sony should continue to move higher. Sony had been rated hold since May.