PayPal Powers eBay: Tech Winners & Losers

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- EBay (EBAY) shares continued their torrid move higher, gaining 2.98% to $54.48, after the company reported strong fourth-quarter results on Wednesday.

Revenue came in at $4 billion, an 18% increase year over year, as Marketplaces generated $2 billion in sales. Excluding items, eBay earned 70 cents a share. Analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters were looking for earnings of 69 cents a share on $3.98 billion in revenue.

PayPal also helped generate strong results for eBay, as the online payments service company saw mobile payments volume rise more than three-fold to $14 billion. Active accounts rose 15% year over year, and the company expects more than $20 billion in 2013.

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Facebook (FB) shares were recapping some of Wednesday's losses, tacking on 0.87% to $30.11 as Wall Street warms up to the Graph Search initiative the company outlined on Tuesday.

Graph Search will be powered by users' friends, and their likes, photos and recommendations to help answer questions in a more social manner, CEO Mark Zuckerberg noted at the event.

Several analysts, including Sterne Agee's Arvind Bhatia, recently raised their price targets on the social networker on the prospects for Graph Search.

"We believe FB's "Graph Search" will enable it to expand beyond Display Advertising into the much bigger market for Search Advertising. We felt it was inevitable FB would get into Search. However, the timing is a bit sooner than we had anticipated," Bhatia wrote in a note. He raised his price target to $37.

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Intel (INTC) shares were up 1.22% to $22.38 as the chipmaker gets set to report earnings after the close Thursday.

Analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters expect Intel to report earnings of 45 cents a share on $13.53 billion in revenue.

--Written by Chris Ciaccia in New York

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