ORCL, Oracle Corp., has a great looking technical chart as it breaks out to new 5-year highs.

IHR, Interstate Hotels & Resorts Inc., is making a retest of the 50DMA support. IHR has been showing up on my momentum stock screen, which usually singles out good stocks.

MNEAF has made a consolidation breakout on above average volume today.

Money is earned to be invested; and mutual funds are one of the best investment options available today. This is because a mutual fund is a fund that permits a group of people to pool their money to invest in a single fund. A fund manager is the person in charge of investing the money that is collected into the specific mutual funds. So by investing on a mutual fund, you will actually be buying shares of the mutual funds and thus become a shareholder of the mutual fund.

Mutual funds are a wise choice for investment as they are cost-efficient and easy for investment. Its biggest advantage is its diversification. You can store money for emergencies, savings or a safe place for storing large sums of money. These types of mutual funds are called money market funds and are short term investments offering double the interest rates banks offer. The specialty of money market funds is that you can issue checks on your account with its great liquidity.

Another type of mutual bond is the bond fund which is basically riskier than money market funds. They are usually used to produce income on retirement and to stabilize a portfolio. These bond funds are further divided into municipal bond funds, corporate bond funds, US Government bond funds, and mortgage backed security funds. Another classification of bond funds is by its maturity. It is then termed as short-term bonds, intermediate term bonds, and long term bonds. The third type of mutual fund is the stock fund where it is riskier than bond funds, but great for growing of money. They perform much better than money market funds and bond funds over long periods of time.

The main benefit of using mutual funds in a portfolio is to achieve maximum diversification in your investments. Another reason people use mutual funds in a portfolio is to target a particular asset class to invest, without having to invest and without buying of any securities of that class. When investing in mutual funds in your portfolio, make sure to choose the right mutual bonds with the help of the mutual fund manager.

Mutual funds are again divided into open end and closed end funds, where most of the funds are open ended. An open ended mutual fund is one where there is no limit to the number of new shares that can be issued by it. Shareholders – both new and existing ones – can add money to their fund, to have new shares issued to them. Open ended funds are redeemable; and to determine the values of a share, you just have to use the Net Asset Value.

As the name implies, closed end funds are more like stocks and issue only a limited number of shares during a public offering. These funds are not obligated to issue new shares and its price is determined by market demand. This is why they are sometimes sold either at a discount or a premium of the net asset value. This is a better choice for the experienced investor, and can easily be bought through a broker.

JOYG, Joy Global Inc., is showing some signs of strength after breaking out of stock trading downtrend.

GLG, Glamis Gold Ltd., has made an ascending triangle stock breakout.

PBG, Pepsi Bottling Group, continues to tread higher after a successful stock bull flag breakout.

Keep ABV stock on your trading picks watchlists.

SUR, CNA Surety Corp., has broken out of a symmetrical triangle stock chart setup.

KLAC was mentioned in our stock fundamental analysis yesterday. KLAC showed up today on my retrace stock screen, so here’s the technical analysis.

The stock broke out of a long base a few weeks ago, and has retraced to the support. Could be a bullish stock if resistance becomes support.

KLA-Tencor Corporation (KLAC) was founded in 1975 in San Jose – California, United States.

KLAC operates for the design, manufacture and marketing of process control and yield management systems for the semiconductor and other related microelectronics industry, areas in which it is the world leader.

KLA-Tencor offers a range of products and services that are used by every wafer, integrated circuit manufacturers and photomask manufacturers from all over the world; the company provides inline wafer defect monitoring; critical dimension metrology; reticle and photomask defect inspection; wafer overlay; film and surface measurement, and overall yield and fab-wide data analysis.

KLAC’s current products portfolio can be divided in 4 different groups, those being; Metrology, Defect Inspection, Data Storage and Customer Service and Support, Yield Management Software Solutions; the company also provides refurbished (cleaned and repaired) KLA-Tencor certified tools, along with warranty and support.

The semiconductor industry grew almost 25% in 2005, while the semiconductor equipment industry grew over 60% last year. Analysts are forecasting that the semiconductor revenue growth will slow to approximately 10% and semiconductor equipment revenues to decline by approximately 7% over the current year.

Over the longer term, KLAC expects the process control to continue to represent a high percentage of their customers’ capital spending.

KLA Tencor employees are now over 5,500 and its full market capitalization is over 9 Billion Dollars.

On the fiscal year ended last June 30, KLAC achieved a profit margin of near 18% and an Operating Margin near the 18.15% area.

With total revenue of around $2 Billion, the company’s revenue per share was over $10 in 2005.

Here are 10 stocks that came up in my uptrend stock screen.

SNWL – SonicWALL, Inc.
HCR – MANOR CARE INC
OCN – OCWEN FINANCIAL CORP
LUM – LUMINENT MTG CAPITA
IHR – Interstate Hotels
OGE – O G E ENERGY CORP
MNCS – Manchester Inc
MIG – MEADOWBROOK INS GROUP INC
AWGI – Alderwoods Group Inc
AETH – Aether Holdings

Uptrending stocks are good in a bad market. If a stock is going up while the rest of the market is going down, it must be a pretty good stock.

SVNT, Savient Pharmaceuticals Inc., showed up on my swing trading breakout stock screen.

The stock has broken out of a uptrending consolidation trading range on enormous volume.

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The latest stock chart pattern scans are out. Here are my latest broker’s stock trading picks.

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Akamai Technologies, Inc. (AKAM) is a Cambridge – Massachusetts, United States Company, incorporated in 1998. I pointed out the AKAM stock chart technicals a few weeks ago.

This company is doing business around the Internet area, by providing services for improving and accelerating the delivery of content and applications over the World Wide Web. The company’s solutions portfolio is designed to aid governmental agencies, businesses, and other enterprises; their tools help improve the revenues and reduce the costs by maximizing the performance of the online businesses.

The Company’s worldwide distributed platform (already in 69 countries) includes more than 18,000 servers in more than 950 different networks.

Last year Akamai Technologies began commercial efforts for selling its Web Application Accelerator service, a solution designed to improve the overall performance of Web and Internet protocol based applications. At the same time the Company also made public 2 free information tools: the “Net Usage Index for Retail”, that measures Internet traffic, and the “Net Usage Index for News”, which covers and tracks online consumption of news at selected sites and portals.

On the fiscal year that ended on last 31st December, the company achieved a Profit Margin of 91.69%, along with an Operating Margin of 21.39%, while its total revenue was $349.84 Million, which means something around $2.35 per share.

Their improved financial results in 2005, when compared to previous years, reflect the company efforts to increase their monthly recurring revenues and at the same time to reduce the expenses needed to support such growth.

Shares at Nasdaq ( NasdaqGS:AKAM ) ended the trading day at $39.98, winning 1.14%, even though still a bit lower than the 52 week high at $42.