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Big Stock Moves For Techs With Earnings Reports This Week

Loading the player… Several tech companies reporting earnings over the latest week lifted in the stock market Friday as major stock indexes perked 1% to 2%. It’s been a volatile trading week amid a market in correction. Twitter ( TWTR ) vaulted 11% Friday, closing at 15.88 and erasing the week’s losses around its fourth quarter report that showed slowing user growth. It’s tweaking its user interface to be a little more like Facebook ( FB ), which currently gets a top stock rating from IBD: a best-possible Composite Rating of 99. (See the video for who’s highly rated or not, and more on the week’s earnings reports.) Akamai ( AKAM ) lifted 3.3% in the stock market today after surging earlier in the week on its quarterly report. IRobot ( IRBT ) rose 4.6%. Cisco Systems ( CSCO ) and Yelp ( YELP ) gained close to 2% each. Pandora Media ( P ) plunged 12% Friday, amid a declining number of users for the streaming music service revealed in its quarterly report Thursday, plus competition from Apple ( AAPL ), highly rated  Alphabet ( GOOGL ) (with a 99 IBD Composite Rating) and Amazon ( AMZN ) in its business. “Pandora’s core profitability appears challenged by higher royalties and diminishing productivity gains, and its new service efforts appear expensive given the poor history of profits in the space,” Pacific Crest Securities analyst Andy Hargreaves said in a research report. Security firm CyberArk ( CYBR ) fell 10.8% for the day. Travel sites TripAdvisor ( TRIP ) and Expedia ( EXPE ) gave back 1.9% and 1.1%, respectively, on Friday. (Both rose Thursday.)  Tesla Motors ( TSLA ) edged up 0.4% Friday. Before Friday’s action, tech companies whose stocks had lifted this week around their quarterly reports included Cisco, Akamai and TripAdvisor, with big jumps, as well as Tesla and Expedia. On the downside were Pandora, iRobot, CyberArk, Yelp and Twitter. Image provided by Shutterstock .    

Visa Investment-Size Disclosure Sends Square Stock Rising

Square ( SQ ) stock gapped up Friday after an  SEC filing  revealed details of a Visa ( V ) investment in Square dating back to 2011. The news of Visa’s investment was widely reported in 2011, but the size of Visa’s stake was unknown to the public until now. After rising as much as 14%, Square stock was up 4%, near 9, in afternoon trading on the stock market today . In a required SEC disclosure, Visa said it owns about 4.19 million of Square’s Class B shares, which aren’t traded on public markets. Those shares, however, are convertible into about 3.52 million Class A shares, which would give the credit card giant a 9.99% stake in those shares but a 1% stake in the business overall. In 2011, at the time of the Visa investment, the Los Angeles Times reported  that the investment was “in the single-digit millions.” Now, that initial investment is worth about $32 million. In a research note Friday, BTIG analyst Mark Palmer wrote: “We think the announcement should serve as a reminder of Square’s attractiveness as an acquisition target. . . . As facilitators of electronic funds transfers like Visa, as well as technology giants such as Apple ( APPL ), Samsung and Google, continue to build out their payments capabilities, their efforts to grab turf within the space will drive consolidation.” Alphabet ( GOOGL ) is Google’s parent company. Palmer says the recent investor sell-off of Square stock is “overdone” and that he remains confident in the company’s future financial performance. His 12-month price target is 15. Square offers digital cash registers which also process payments to small and midsize businesses. In recent years it has also capitalized on the reams of data that it collects from each transaction and now offers its customers beta-based marketing services. Square also has added short-term cash advances — assessing risk based on the transaction data — and other financial services. On Square’s first day of trading in November, the stock vaulted 45% to nearly 15, which remains by far its all-time high. Initial shares priced at 9. Visa has not changed the size of its stake in Square since its initial investment, the Wall Street Journal reported , citing unnamed sources “familiar with the matter.”

What Facebook’s Oculus, Google See In Virtual Reality’s Future

Loading the player… At this week’s Vision Summit for virtual reality and augmented reality in Hollywood, executives from Facebook ( FB )-owned Oculus, Alphabet ( GOOGL )-owned Google and Sony ( SNE )-owned PlayStation shared their insights about the future of VR. Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, who sold his company to Facebook in 2014 for $2 billion, said that both hardware and software developers need to be successful for VR to be prosperous, with two key measures of success being dollars spent on content and hours spent playing content. Facebook has said Oculus Headset and Rift-ready PC bundles will go on presale next Tuesday, starting at $1,499. Oculus is offering the bundles at a discounted rate to get more gear out there. Apple Momentum Google’s VP of VR, Clay Bavor, pressed the point that the Internet giant’s goal is “VR for everyone.” He said that some 5 million of the cheap Google Cardboard viewers — which use smartphones to show VR content — had shipped as of the end of 2015, with 30 million Google Play Store app downloads. He said that there’s “similar momentum” on Apple ( AAPL ) iOS. Google is also working in the augmented reality space with its Project Tango, which enables mobile devices “to navigate the physical world similar to how we do as humans.” Microsoft’s HoloLens In Space? Sony is one of the companies working with NASA on robot control and space exploration demos. Microsoft ’s ( MSFT ) HoloLens is also said to have space applications. Dr. Richard Marks, the director of PlayStation Magic Lab, said that Sony’s VR platform will have the capability to be used with other entertainment content besides games, including movies, painting, sculpting and potentially even live concerts.