Reuters
Shares of the San Jose, California-based company fell as much as 8.2 percent in after-hours trading, and were last changing hands at $25.52, ...
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CommVault Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: CVLT) has been trading higher all day on the Goldman Sachs analyst upgrade to ‘Buy’ this morning.  The gains are large and we are seeing some options trading as a result. The actual share volume is active considering this company itself, but is still far short of what we would call extremely active in buyout speculation trading.
Joe Kunkle over at OptionsHawk.com this morning noted that calls are trading 5,068 versus average volume of 774 already today with implied volatility increasing 11.7% to 48%, and with shares at just $22.70 there are buyers at the offer of December $25 and $30 calls. My best explanation for this is that with NetApp (NTAP) reporting earnings on 11/18/09 after the close we could see our next big Tech M&A deal with CommVault (CVLT), a small niche player with huge growth potential, the Company NetApp could acquire. There is also some bullish action in NetApp with a buyer of 2,000 November $32 calls earlier this morning, so this action adds up to a potential deal on the horizon.
Anything is possible in technology M&A and the company is in data and information management software applications and related services. It is in the sweet spot of the sector. But insiders also sold over $1 million worth of stock last week as a sale window opened up. While Dell Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) and NetApp, Inc. (NASDAQ: NTAP) we have also heard of other likely suitors that are possible but were not rumor-mill buyers.
At 12:40 PM EST we have shares up 5.7% at $22.54 on over 386,000 shares. Average volume is only 342,000 shares, so any interest here is probably something all relative. This $22.92 intraday high was also a new 52-week high.
JON C. OGG
Sprint Nextel Corp. (NYSE: S) appears to be one the largest S&P gainers this morning. The only news was the repayment of a $1 billion loan, but real news out today causing the run-up is the Oppenheimer upgrade to OUTPERFORM from Neutral. The price target was also raised to $6.00 from a prior $4.00 price target. At 9:46 AM EST we have shares trading up almost 11% at $3.44 on 15.5 million shares. Average daily volume is 55 million shares and the 52-week trading range is $1.35 to $5.94. We would also note that this is already seeing options activity picking up this morning in the longer-dated expiration months.
JON C. OGG
Netlist Inc. (NASDAQ: NLST) is rising yet again after being on a tear last week. This stock came under attention because of its launch of Netlist’s HyperCloud memory module for servers. This morning the company said that at Supercomputing 09, it is demonstrating the world’s first 16GB 2 virtual rank double-data-rate three, registered dual in-line memory module. Average volume was only about 150,000 last week but now the average volume is approximately 300,000 shares. At 8:40 AM EST we have already seen 350,000 shares trade hands and the stock is up 14% at $5.10. The 52-week trading range was $0.14 to $4.83. Last Tuesday this was not even a $1.00 stock to show how much it has risen. And the stock more than doubled in price on Friday on over 11.4 million shares. If this is not an inflection point for traders, that must be close. The caveat is that this is only an $88 million market cap even after last week’s exponential rise.
-JON OGG