Red Hat, Novell: Tech Winners & Losers
NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- The positive news in trading Thursday came mostly from tech, thanks in part to surging gains by Tessco Technologies (TESS) and Red Hat (RHT) .
Shares of Tessco, the Hunt Valley, Md., builder of wireless technology, were rising about 26%, or about $3.20, to $15.54 on speculation of a buyout by its second-largest shareholder,
Discovery Group
. In a Sept. 22 letter to Tessco's board of directors, Discovery said that it would pay $15.50 a share for the company, a 42% premium on the stock's average closing price for the past month.
Red Hat
, the open source software provider out of Raleigh, saw its highest intraday price Thursday in more than a decade, thanks to better-than-expected second-quarter earnings it reported Wednesday. The Linux seller, rising 12% to $41.16, reported sales of $219.8 million, up from the $183.6 million reported in the same period last year. Analysts were expecting $211.49 million.
|
Shares of
PC Mall
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, a reseller of computers and electronics equipment, were rising more than 15% to $5.86 following its recent earnings report on one of its best quarters ever -- the company beat expectations with a profit of 11 cents a share; analysts expected 9 cents EPS.
Portfolio manager Bob Auer of Auer Growth Fund told
TheStreet
that
-- maybe even triple -- over the next year.
The Day's Losers
Thursday's tech losers were led by enterprise software provider
Novell
(NOVL)
, the
Microsoft
(MSFT)
and
Oracle
(ORCL)
competitor. Its stock was trading down 51 cents to $6 on worries that Novell is having problems closing its deal to sell its Netware product.
Reuters
reported that prospective buyers, mostly private-equity firms, are unwilling to pay the product's asking price.
Lastly, small, specialized chip maker
RF Micro Devices
(RFMD)
, which competes with
Skyworks Solutions
(SWKS)
and
Triquint
(TQNT)
, was down 5.33% to $5.68, most likely due to recent positive outlook from the bigger rivals.
--Written by Maggie Overfelt in New Y ork.
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