By Geoffrey Smith
Investing.com -- Stocks in focus in premarket trading on Wednesday, 19th January. Please refresh for updates.
- Procter & Gamble (NYSE:PG) stock rose 1.7% as the consumer giant raised its guidance for organic sales growth after a quarter in which it was able to raise prices for most items.
- Morgan Stanley (NYSE:MS) stock rose 4.0% after it beat forecasts for quarterly earnings. Strong revenue from equities trading and origination, coupled with a 10% rise in wealth management revenue, led earnings to beat expectations by around 5%.
- Bank of America (NYSE:BAC) stock rose 3.5% after its quarterly update showed a further release of provisions, along with buoyant revenue from lending and investment banking. The bank wasn’t able to escape the trend of falling revenue from bond trading, but did mitigate it with a strong performance in equities.
- UnitedHealth (NYSE:UNH) stock rose 0.7% after the U.S.’s biggest health insurer repeated its full-year guidance after an unspectacular set of results. Healthcare services unit Optum, which manages drug benefits and offers healthcare data analytics services, raised revenue by 15%, while adjusted earnings came in around 3% above expectations.
- Cisco Systems (NASDAQ:CSCO) stock fell 2.4% after Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS) analysts downgraded it to neutral, saying the stock is now close to fair value.
- ASML ADRs (NASDAQ:ASML) rose 3.3% after the Dutch-based maker of chipmaking equipment raised its dividend by around half and forecast another year in which it will struggle to meet buoyant demand for its lithographic machinery. It also announced first orders for a new type of high-end machine.
- Sony (NYSE:SONY) stock fell another 3.7% in response to the competitive threat to its PlayStation operations from Microsoft's (NASDAQ:MSFT) acquisition of Activision Blizzard (NASDAQ:ATVI). The ADRs had already fallen over 7% on Tuesday.