News

• Wall Street Beat: Hardware, chip sales shine

  Upbeat sales reports and forecasts continue to pour in for the PC and chip market, offering yet more evidence that economic recovery has already spurred a worldwide resurgence in spending on hardware.

• Wall Street Beat: IT leads market rally

  Are shares of IT vendors set to rise again? Fueled by strong sales reports from Lenovo and NetApp, tech stocks led a broad market rally Thursday that was generally ascribed to news about China's confidence in Europe, which faces a debt crisis in Greece and other Mediterranean countries.

• Wall Street to install 'circuit breaker' to head off market gyrations

  Regulators plan to enact new rules to curb the type of market volatility behind the May 6 "flash crash" that caused the Dow to plunge almost 1,000 points in a half hour. The goal is to head off market gyrations that can be exacerbated by automated high-speed trading.

• Mac sales to set another record, says analyst

  Apple will report selling another record number of Macs in the final quarter of 2009 when it unveils its financial figures later this month, a Wall Street analyst said Thursday in a note to clients.

• Wall Street Beat: After yearly high, doubts remain for tech

  In a tumultuous week on the market, the attention of IT investors was captured by a mixed bag of acquisition activity and earnings news from the hardware and chip arena -- a sector that is supposed to help lead tech out of the recession.

• Programmer steals Wall Street trading code, FBI alleges

  A high-level developer for a major Wall Street firm was arrested by the FBI on Friday and charged with stealing computer code that automates high-volume trading on stock and commodities markets, according to court documents.

• Sun blames Wall Street for $1.7B loss

  Blaming the downturn in the financial sector, Sun Microsystems reported a US$1.68 billion loss for its most recent fiscal quarter on Thursday.

• IT security spending not darkened by economic gloom

  The global financial crisis so visible this past month is beginning to take its toll on information-technology spending, though IT security spending is expected to be spared in what many think will be a dismal coming year.

• As stocks drop, NYSE offers refresher on 'circuit-breakers'

  Fears that the major US financial markets would follow other markets as they dropped on Friday prompted the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) to highlight rules about market-wide trading halts that kick in when indices plummet below certain pre-defined levels.

• How IT pros can prosper despite economic woes

  As the country collectively holds its breath to see if efforts to shore up the faltering economy succeed, IT professionals should be updating skills, taking on new responsibilities and working to become indispensable to their employers, experts say.

• Open sourcing code may improve transparency on Wall Street

  The full depth of IT's involvement in Wall Street's meltdown is unknown, but one plan to stop it from happening again calls upon a growing IT trend: open source.

• The IT worker's Wall Street meltdown worry list

  The only thing that seems clear today is that the US is in a recession and possibly a bad one. No one is certain what will happen next. Events are changing almost by the hour. How much help will a federal bailout deliver to the nation's financial system, which has been hard-hit by the downturn? Will more financial institutions collapse, and how far down will the stock market go? Will you have a job?

• Wall Street's collapse puts US IT spending in (some) peril

  The overall economic cost of Wall Street's collapse has yet to be totaled. But it's clear that IT departments will be laboring under some changed conditions in the months ahead.

• The tech sector's silent alarm: Venture capital drying up

  The tech sector is experiencing a crash -- not of stock prices, which rebounded somewhat on Wall Street on Tuesday -- but in its ability to take new companies public.

• Black Monday hits tech stocks, likely to affect US IT workforce

  Wall Street's 777-point sell-off on Monday signaled that the US tech sector is unlikely to emerge unscathed by the economic downturn -- with companies being hit in unexpected ways. Just look what happened to Apple, which has been performing strongly in recent quarters.