niceguy and thread,
enjoy this one from TSC:
The Night Watch: After-Hours Gang Takes First Crack at the Market's Hits and Misses
By Eric Gillin
Staff Reporter
4/12/00 8:33 PM ET
A cold wind ripped through the canyons of Wall Street this afternoon, creating a low howl that harmonized with the market mood. Steep selling froze out the chances for a rally on either the New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq Stock Market. Technology slid uncontrollably, leaving a red smear on tickers as money flew off the table. And the temperatures outside chilled as they fell.
With earnings season beginning to thicken and markets appearing to cool, late-night traders find themselves in an interesting predicament. They get first crack at these companies with their just-released news. Overall, volume gets thinner as earnings season rears its head. Night watchers usually choose to sit on the sidelines and let the day-session guys call the shots.
Tonight, that tradition stayed true on Island, as their investors stayed shy, while the Instinet crowd dived into the large cap names with less inhibition.
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Some companies beat estimates by a penny and investors just shrug. What's a penny worth nowadays? You can't even get stale candy from a supermarket-vending machine with that. But the gap between Advanced Micro Devices (AMD:NYSE - news - boards) earnings and the estimate will send children into the parking lot with big grins.
You could probably run to the store and pick up two super hi-bounce balls and a cheap aluminum ring with the distance between AMD's first quarter and the analyst estimates. The chipmaker's earnings came in at $1.15 a share, 57 cents better than the 58-cent First Call/Thomson Financial estimate. Last year's quarter got dwarfed as well, coming in at an 88-cent loss.
Sales topped $1 billion for the first time, coming in at $1.09 billion, 73% better than the previous year's quarter. Increased demand for the Athlon chip and its flash memory chips were the big reason for the sales boost. The company also said that full-year total sales growth would rise more than 50%.
The news was greeted happily by beleaguered investors, who send the stock up on both Instinet and composite trading. It rose 12 5/8 to 75 7/8 on 93,000 shares on Instinet and came well off its New York close.
AMD closed in New York at 63 13/16, some 6 13/16 points away from where it opened. The chipmaker had a rotten day along with the rest of the Philadelphia Stock Exchange Semiconductor Index components. But, the earnings figures changed all that after the bell and AMD began to rocket higher in composite trading. At last check, AMD traded at 76, a 5 3/8 point gain for the day and some 12 3/16 points higher than where it closed in Gotham.
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