Hot Stock Profiles

Just when you thought the federal government had done just about every despicable thing it could to the Native American population, they decided to raise the bar…

The USDA approved a plan to dumping thousands of tons of trash on one of their reservations.

You see, Hawaii has some serious garbage issues… For one, while the average American creates about 4.5 pounds of trash a day, the average Hawaiian citizen creates over 9.

The state’s largest city, Honolulu, is only authorized to use one landfill and it’s way over capacity.

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As the business world becomes ever more reliant on technology in order to function efficiently and remain competitive, there is plenty of behind the scenes wheeling and dealing going on between major players in this fast-moving sector that investors may want to keep track of. A merger bid by Dell, and the subsequent raising of the stakes by Hewlett Packard, for a company that reportedly has not managed to turn an annual profit since it became a public company three years ago, has been drawing a great deal of interest. The company at the center of attention is Fremon, California, based 3PAR, which received and accepted a merger bid from Dell, only to announce on the weekend that the board of the data storage company would be terminating its merger agreement with Dell in favor of the offer by HP, which it considers to be a “superior proposal”.

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Oil prices slumped Wednesday, yet now they’re strangely higher. The curious move may have more to do with stocks than oil.

As the WSJ’s Carolyn Cui recently reported, crude oil may now be more influenced by the stock market than its own inventory levels or demand patterns. Earlier this month, Cui pegged the correlation between crude and the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index at around 70%, roughly double the average since 2008.

That love fest seemed to be in evidence Wednesday. Oil futures dipped as low as $70.76 a barrel, the lowest since June 8, after a weekly report showed that U.S. crude, gasoline and distillate inventories got large, unexpected increases last week. That makes sense: If there’s more supply of oil, prices should fall, along with share prices of companies in the energy sector.

But instead, oil prices later popped higher, trading up 1.4% at $72.52. That se

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Futures are pointing towards a slightly higher open this morning as mergers and acquisitions (M&A) have once again taken center stage.

Hewlett-Packard (HPQ, $39.85, down $0.91) has made a $1.5 billion bid for data storage provider 3Par (PAR, $18.04, up $0.01) this morning, just a week after rival Dell (DELL, $12.07, up $0.03) agreed to acquire the company for $1.1 billion.

Both HP and Dell have been looking to expand beyond personal computers and they see an attractive candidate in 3Par.  HP it will pay $24 a share to acquire the company, or a 33% premium over Dell’s bid of $18 a share.

Elsewhere, HSBC Holdings (HBC, $49.30, down $0.63) is in talks to buy a controlling stake in Nedbank Group from Old Mutual for as much as $7 billion.

Potash (POT, $149.67, up $0.84) is higher in pre-market trading and over $152 after formally rejected BHP Billiton’s (BHP, $67.44, dup $0.09) offer and is getting interest from other companies (and countries).

M&A activity continues to heat up in the dog days of August as companies with strong balance sheets and excess cash go on the hunt for bargains.  This positive catalyst could help the bulls’ case in holding current levels on the major indexes as potential acquisitions are a sign companies are confident the economy will grow and business will improve in the coming quarters. 

Ahead we head to press, Dow futures are up 25 points to 10,227 while the S&P 500 futures are up 4 points to 1,074.  The Nasdaq 100 futures are higher by 10 to 1,835. 

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