The third week of March will be short on earnings releases and lacking in major economic reports. Nevertheless, investors should keep an eye on key earnings reports from Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) and General Mills (NYSE: GIS).
Shares of doughnut-maker Krispy Kreme (NYSE: KKD) tumbled early Friday after the company released disappointing earnings. For the fourth-quarter, Krispy Kreme earned $0.11 per share on revenue of $118 million. Wall Street had been expecting the company to earn $0.12 on $116 million.
Krispy Kreme raised its fiscal-year 2013 guidance to $0.53-0.57.
Value investors tend to focus on a few key metrics. Classically, these include price-to-earnings ratios, price-to-book ratios, dividend yield and debt load.
Forward PE ratios are a measure of a stock's price to its estimated future earnings.
Shares of Bank of America (NYSE: BAC) gained about 5% in after-hours trading on Thursday after the company announced that it would repurchase about $5 billion worth of common stock and redeem $5.5 billion in preferred stock.
Bank of America was one of the biggest financial gainers in Thursday's after-hours session.
Shares of Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) traded down over three percent on Thursday after analysts at JPMorgan downgraded the stock from Overweight to Neutral. JPMorgan lowered its price target on Amazon to $300 from $333.
Late Wednesday, shares of BlackBerry (NASDAQ: BBRY) spiked higher into the close after an interesting press release declared that the company had sold one million BlackBerry 10 smartphones to an “established partner.”
The release gave no indication who the partner was, or even what type of BlackBerry 10 devices they were (there are two, the Z10 an