Sprint Nextel, Palm: Early Volume Plays

(Palm item updated to correct Michael Abbott's position with the company.)

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Sprint Nextel (S) was set to be a volume leader among stocks trading near $5 Monday following an analyst upgrade.

Sprint shares rose 0.7% to $4.11 in the premarket trading session after Wells Fargo upgraded the stock to outperform from market perform.

In late March, Sprint unveiled the EVO 4G, which it touted as the world's first 4G smartphone.

The three-month average daily volume for Sprint is 56.99 million, according to Yahoo! Finance.

Elsewhere, Standard Pacific (SPF) may trade lower on an increase in volume after the homebuilder reported a first-quarter loss of 2 cents a share, which surprised analysts who expected a break-even quarter.

Additionally, Standard Pacific reported revenue of $175.4 million in the first quarter, which was down 16% from a year ago and was much worse than the Thomson Reuters average estimate of $279.4 million.

Standard Pacific shares closed Friday at $5.51. The three-month average daily volume for Standard Pacific is 2.2 million.

Palm (PALM), which has traded on big swings on speculation the company is a takeover target, said in a regulatory filing that it is paying certain key employees a grant of restricted stock units and a cash bonus of $250,000.

The news of retention bonuses came as Michael Abbott, Palm's senior VP of software and sales, tendered his resignation on April 12.

Palm shares closed Friday at $5.59. The 50-day average daily volume for Palm is 31 million, according to the Nasdaq.

EntreMed (ENMD) may lose ground Monday after the pharmaceutical company said it priced a registered direct offering of roughly 5.79 million shares at 51.8 cents per share for net proceeds of $2.8 million.

EntreMed said it will use the net proceeds for further clinical development of its Aurora A/angiogenic kinase inhibitor, ENMD-2076. EntreMed recently announced the initiation of a Phase 2 study in ovarian cancer patients after encouraging Phase 1 results.

EntreMed shares closed Friday at 62 cents. The 50-day average daily volume for is 392,000.

-- Written by Robert Holmes in Boston.

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