52-Week Highs: Apple, Qwest, Baidu

These blue chips are hitting 52-week highs, representing strength in a variety of sectors.

Author:
Miriam Reimer
Publish date:
Sep 20, 2010 6:43 PM EDT

These blue chips are hitting 52-week highs, representing strength in a variety of sectors.

(Updated with additional information and stock price movement.)

NEW YORK (

) -- A wealth of healthy buying in recent weeks led a variety of blue chips to hit fresh 52-week highs on Monday, including technology darling

Apple

(AAPL) - Get Free Report

and Dow Jones industrial average components

Caterpillar

(CAT) - Get Free Report

Du Pont

(DD) - Get Free Report

and

Kraft Foods

( KFT).

Jim Cramer told the viewers of his

"Mad Money"

TV show last week the

52-week high list

tells us everything we need to know about the market, though it's not the number of companies hitting 52-week highs that's important, it's the number of industries represented on the list.

>>Cramer's 'Mad Money' Recap: 52-Week High Breakout

He explained that just a month ago, there were only three industries on the list, and they represented people's fears of the market. But today, there's an astounding 25 different industries rpresented, a diverse swath of our economy.

Ranked by volume, the most heavily-traded stock to hit a fresh 52-week high Monday was

L-1 Identity Solutions

( ID), holding steady in afternoon trading around $11.65.

L-1 Identity, a maker of high-tech recognition and security systems, agreed to be acquired by France's

Safran

for $12 a share, or $1.6 billion including debt.

Qwest Communications

rose as high as $6.31 in trading Monday.

Shares of Apple rose to a fresh 52-week high of $283.78 on Monday.

The stock's push higher was thanks to an

analyst report from Kaufman Bros. that suggested strong iPad sales could lift Apple's quarterly results above Wall Street's current expectations. Analyst Shaw Wu raised his price target on Apple shares to $374, from $350.

Shares of data warehouse provider

Netezza

( NZ) soared more than 16% to an annual high of $28.59.

Netezza said Monday it agreed to be acquired by IBM (IBM) - Get Free Report for $1.7 billion, or $27 per share in cash

Baidu

(BIDU) - Get Free Report

, the Beijing-based Chinese language Internet search engine, rose to $90 on Monday.

Baidu was recently featured on TheStreet's list of most overbought stocks

>>18 Overbought Stocks to Sell Now

Bristol-Myers Squibb

(BMY) - Get Free Report

shares pushed up to $27.87 on Monday. Along with

AstraZeneca

(AZN) - Get Free Report

, Bristol-Myers announced progress made in a double blind Phase 3 clinical study of diabetes investigational drug dapagliflozin.

American depositary receipts of Chinese solar company

JA Solar Holdings

(JASO)

gained to $7.53 on Monday. JA Solar was among the top five producers of solar cell manufacturers in the second quarter.

Dow component Caterpillar pushed up to a 52-week high of $74.80. The economic bellwether said early Monday it won a long-term Department of Defense contract to provide wheeled tractor scrapers for $641.2 million.

Internet travel booking form

Expedia

(EXPE) - Get Free Report

hit a new 52-week high of $28.96 on Monday, despite its stock receiving a downgrade by Susquehanna from positive to neutral."

Shares of cigarette maker

Philip Morris International

(PM) - Get Free Report

rose to a new 52-week high of $56.23.

Kraft Foods

hit an annual share price of high of $31.62.

Internet Brands

( INET) saw its shares skyrocket more than 44% to $13.40 on Monday. The internet media company agreed to be acquired by an affiliate of

Hellman & Friedman Capital Partners VI

for around $640 million, or $13.35 in cash for each outstanding share.

Dow component

Du Pont

saw its share price gain to $44.79 on Monday.

The chemical maker said Monday it and

Invista

signed a settlement agreement to resolve three existing lawsuits between the companies.

Data warehouse

Teradata

(TDC) - Get Free Report

pushed its annual share price high to $38.27 on Monday. The share price jump came after an analyst speculated that the data storage company could be a takeover candidate.

"We consider Teradata a logical potential target as well; a bigger vendor with more of a services component but also one with successful data warehouse appliance offerings," noted Roth Capital Partners analyst Nathan Schneiderman.

Online retailer

Amazon.com

(AMZN) - Get Free Report

gained to $151.95 on Monday. The firm's Amazon Web Services, along with billionaire Larry Ellison-run

Oracle

(ORCL) - Get Free Report

, announced that a wide selection of Oracle enterprise software has been certified to run on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) using Oracle VM virtualization.

Tech firm

NetApp

, another provider of data storage solutions, saw its share price rise to $49.87 on Monday, a fresh 52-week high.

Semiconductor maker

Atmel

(ATML)

pushed up to a fresh 52-week high of $7.25 on Monday.

Kimco Realty

(KIM) - Get Free Report

set itself a fresh 52-week high of $16.84. The real estate investment trust is expected to report earnings of 6 cents per share on revenue of $212.6 million for the current quarter.

CMS Energy

(CMS) - Get Free Report

pushed up to a fresh 52-week high of $18.12 on Monday. Ratings agency

Morningstar

initiated coverage of the Michigan energy company with an issuer rating of BBB-, reflecting the utility's status as a regulated entity, the level of automatic rate adjustment mechanisms the utility operates under, and the recent improvement in Michigan's regulatory environment.

Rovi

undefined

, a provider of interactive program guides and embedded licensing technologies, pushed its annual share price boundary higher to $47.19. The tech firm signed a multi-year agreement to license intellectual property to Apple, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

-- Written by Miriam Marcus Reimer in New York.

>To contact the writer of this article, click here:

Miriam Reimer

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