Palm Jumps After Beating Street Estimates
DEBORAH MARCHINI, CNN ANCHOR: Our top stories: Federal Reserve policymakers will show their cards today at about 2:15 p.m. Eastern. Expectations of a rate cut are practically universal, but economists seem to be almost evenly split on whether it will be a half percentage point or a quarter. Palm beat estimates last quarter. The handheld computer maker lost 16 cents a share from operations. That's 3 cents better than was expected, and the company expects to be in the black by the second quarter of next year. Less optimism from its major shareholder 3Com, it posted a wider- than-expected fourth quarter loss. The network equipment maker does not see a turnaround anytime soon. Lucent Technologies may be planning another round of layoffs. "The Wall Street Journal" reports the telecom equipment maker could cut another 10,000 jobs. That's on top of the 35,000 jobs being eliminated through layoffs and early retirement packages. We'll be looking for Tuesday's after-hours rally to extend into this morning's trading following a batch of corporate news after the bell. Jen Rogers is live at the Instinet to tell us about it. Hi, Jen.</s>JEN ROGERS, CNN MARKETS EDITOR: Good morning, Debbie. Well, let's start with Palm because that was really the big winner here last night. At its high, we saw Palm shares up nearly 18 percent. We saw 1.4 million shares pumped through here so that was a lot of volume and that is good momentum going into this morning. That news also gave a boost to some other handheld device makers. Among them: Research in Motion, which makes BlackBerry, and also Handspring. So watch out for shares of those two companies as well. But, of course, we did have some warnings after the bell. Let's start with Vitesse Semiconductor. This was the second warning this week from a communications chipmaker. We heard from AMCC on Monday night and that hurt Vitesse stock yesterday. We'll see how it does today after its own warning. They came out telling the Street to look for an operating loss in the third quarter instead of a profit that the Street was looking for. If you look at that chart there, down 82 percent from its 52-week high. We also got a warning out of Xilinx. This is a programmable logic device maker. They came out warning of a sequential revenue drop in the first quarter, down from the fourth quarter 32 percent. Now they are set to report quarterly results on July 19, so look out for this stock as well today. And finally, Oracle. We did get some bullish news out of this company. Larry Ellison, the company's CEO, coming out and saying the current quarter is a lot stronger -- quote -- "a lot stronger" than the previous quarter and that was sending shares up here after hours. We'll see if that extends into the regular session as well -- Debbie.</s>MARCHINI: All right. Thank you, Jen. TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com