Stocks to Watch for the All Things Digital Conference: AAPL, ORCL, P, LNKD, ZNGA

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The Wall Street Journal's
All Things Digital Conference
will take place from today until Thursday, May 31st. Apple's CEO, Tim Cook, is expected to be the first speaker at 6pm PT tonight. This will be the 10th annual All Things Digital Conference and according its website, this year's conference is currently sold out. The conference will highlight speeches by influential leaders from some of the nation's most notable technology companies. Over the past decade, the conference has built a reputation for breaking news and unveiling innovations that have the potential to move stocks. In addition to featuring Apple
AAPL
CEO Tim Cook, this year's conference will feature CEOs of three other publicly traded companies: Oracle
ORCL
, Zynga
ZNGA
and LinkedIn
LNKD
. These four companies may see share price movements related to their CEOs' speeches, a possibility that makes all four of them stocks to watch:
Apple:
The future of Apple has been a point of contention. Shares of Apple have risen more than 40% year to date, but have declined around 10% since their peak in early April. The consumer electronics firm is currently the largest US company by market capitalization. If Apple unveils a new product such as Apple TV at the conference, shares of the company may see significant price movement. Apple has provided its shareholders tremendous capital appreciation over the past decade, but at this point, its relatively modest price-to-earnings ratio might be an indicator that investors are skeptical about whether its strong profit growth can continue. Apple has disproven nay-sayers many times in the past, but could the company follow in the footsteps of Sony
SNE
and fall from glory?
Oracle:
Shares of Oracle have essentially amplified the major movements of the S&P 500 index year to date, up 18% year to date at their peak in March, but now up around 4% year to date. Some
commentators
are anticipating increases in Oracle's stock price as a result of recent acquisitions and a secular trend toward cloud computing. Others are getting impatient after Oracle, over the past twelve months, has reported less-than-explosive earnings growth and has seen an approximate 20.5% stock price decline.
Zynga:
Social game provider Zynga's share price has declined more than 20% since the day of Facebook's
FB
IPO. This IPO may have detracted from Zynga's value as a publicly traded proxy for Facebook. The company has recently released news about a deal with DreamWorks to advertise on the game “Draw Something.” But with little other positive news about the company, Zynga's CEO may feel pressure to provide investors with a reason to be optimistic about the stock.
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LinkedIn:
This professional networking site has seen share price growth of more than 55% year to date, after the company has been one of the few internet stocks that are currently profitable and projecting significant earnings growth. LinkedIn has a lofty price-to-earnings ratio near 611. Will LinkedIn grow quickly enough to justify a price-to-earnings ratio this high? The consensus analyst estimate for this fiscal year's asjusted earnings per share is $0.68 and for the following fiscal year is $1.22, an anticipated increase of approximately 79.5%.
Other companies
sending speakers to the conference include Google
GOOG
, Disney
DIS
, Microsoft
MSFT
, Spotify and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byer. Shares of streaming music provider Pandora
P
have already traded more than 4% lower today, perhaps partly in anticipation of a speech at the conference by the CEO of Spotify, one of Pandora's competitors. Some speakers will be
streamed live
from the conference. A schedule is available on the conference's
website
.
Disclosure: At the time of this writing, I did not own shares of any companies mentioned in this post.
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