Afternoon Market Update

Shares of EMC Corp (NYSE: EMC) gained about 3% after the analysts at Oppenheimer upgraded the company from “perform” to “outperform.” The upgrade in the rating was due to healthy demand for data storage systems. Analyst Ittai Kidron of Oppenheimer mentioned, "Backed by our positive checks in the U.S. and Europe, we believe EMC is set to deliver strong second-quarter 2010 results, and we see the momentum flowing into the third quarter."

Shares of Netlist Inc (NASDAQ: NLST) jumped more than 19% after the company received the OEM qualification from Dell Inc (NASDAQ: DELL) for its non-volatile cache subsystems, NetVault NV. The NetVault NV subsystems have been qualified by DELL to support RAID storage applications on PowerEdge servers and PowerVault Direct Attached Storage solutions.

The US dollar fell against the euro and the British pound. It also remained weak versus the Japanese yen after the US stocks widened their gains today. The dollar index (DXY) that tracks the greenback’s performance against a basket of six major currencies was down by 0.02%. Due to the absence of any US economic data on the calendar, currency market is reacting only to the performance of US stocks.

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