Before the Open (Jun 6)

Posted on by Jason Leavitt

Good morning. Happy Wednesday.
The Asian/Pacific markets closed mostly up. Hong Kong, South Korea, India, New Zealand, Taiwan, Australia and Malaysia all did well; Indonesia and Singapore closed down. Europe, Africa and the Middle East currently lean to the upside. Germany, the UAE, South Africa, Kenya, Hungary, Spain, Portugal and Austria are leading while Turkey, Greece and Italy are down. Futures in the States point towards a positive open for the cash market.
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VIDEO: There’s a Bull Market Somewhere
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The dollar is down. Oil is down; copper is up. Gold and silver are mixed and little changed. Bonds are down.
Overnight Stock Movers from barchart.com…
Cigna (CI -0.10%) was upgraded to ‘Buy’ from ‘Neutral’ at Goldman Sachs with a price target of $212.
Manitowoc (MTW -3.45%) was upgraded to ‘Buy’ from ‘Hold’ at SunTrust Robinson Humphrey with a price target of $33.
Tesla (TSLA -1.89%) rose over 1% in after-hours trading after CEO Elon Musk said the company is likely to reach a production rate of 5,000 cars per week by the end of the month and that he sees positive cash flow in Q3 and Q4.
Madrigal Pharmaceuticals (MDGL +10.17%) lost more than 1% in after-hours trading after it announced that it had commenced an underwritten public offering of $200 million of its common stock.
United States Steel (X -1.10%) announced that it will restart the second blast furnace at its Granite City Works plant and hire about 300 people for the restart, which is scheduled for around October 1.
Kohl’s (KSS +4.72%) was downgraded to ‘Underweight’ from ‘Neutral’ at Atlantic Equities LLP with a price target of $65.
Evergy (EVRG +0.46%) was rated a new ‘Outperform’ at Wolfe Research with a price target of $60.
Floor & Decor (FND -0.87%) was rated a new ‘Outperform’ at William Blair & Co.
NCI Building Systems (NCS +1.57%) jumped nearly 10% in after-hours trading after it reported Q1 adjusted Ebitda of $39.7 million, better than consensus of $34.4 million, and then forecast Q3 adjusted Ebitda of $56 million to $66 million, the midpoint well above consensus of $58.4 million.
Layne Christensen (LAYN +0.39%) rose almost 3% in after-hours trading after it reported Q1 revenue of $114.6 million.
ImmunoGen (IMGN +7.40%) slid 4% in after-hours trading after it announced that it intends to offer 12 million shares of its common stock in an underwritten public offering.
Today’s Economic Calendar
7:00 MBA Mortgage Applications
8:30 International Trade
Other…
today’s upgrades/downgrades from briefing.com
this week’s Earnings from Morningstar
this week’s Economic Numbers/Reports powered by ECONODAY

4 thoughts on “Before the Open (Jun 6)”

  1. Some of the FANGMAN stocks are massive share buyback queens, such as Apple and Microsoft. Others are bottomless cash-sinkholes, such as junk-rated Netflix, which has to constantly raise new money, either by selling more shares or selling debt, so that it has more fuel to burn through, and it doesn’t have a dime to buy back its own shares.
    That $173.6 billion in share repurchase plans includes the record-braking mega-announcement from Apple that it would buy back $100 billion of its own shares. Here are the top five that account for $134.3 billion, or 77% of the total:
    Apple: $100 billion
    Micron: $10 billion
    Qualcomm: $8.8 billion
    Adobe: $8.0 billion
    T-Mobile: $7.5 billion
    To put that May total of $173.6 billion.
    The point is that these firms can not exist without manipulations to provide working capital. When the music stops mnay firms will cease to be solvent. Caution into fall 2018.

    1. I expect to see a PC refresh cycle when Intel and AMD fix their hardware for the meltdown/spectre bugs. The fixes, so far, have been in firmware and software but those kinds of fixes present problems. The fixes impact performance by 10 to 15 percent but I think that big companies would prefer to not have computers with hardware vulnerabilities at all. Intel and AMD are going back to providing big performance gains with new generations of processors as well. I expect Micron to be a beneficiary of a PC refresh cycle – though they have some legal difficulties right now.

      1. Michael…when do you expect them to fix their issues. I’m due for a new PC but would willing to wait until the issues are fixed. – Jason

  2. “record-braking mega-announcement from Apple that it would buy back $100 billion of its own shares.”
    Maybe it would be better spent greasing some palms in China to avoid a whopping big anti-Trump tariff on US tech goods sold in China.

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