Top Stocks

By Anthony Agnello, InvestorPlace.com

First Gmail sorted out the spam. Now it will make sure that important contract doesn’t get lost amid chain letters from college pals or trash talk over your fantasy football team.

This week, Google (GOOG) will begin offering a new feature the company calls Priority Inbox. It will automatically predict which incoming messages are more likely to be read and therefore are more important to you.

Some people are worried that Gmail is getting a bit too nosy, but other time-strapped e-mail readers could embrace the technology as a better way to check mail. Here are the big features and possible drawbacks.

By James Rogers, TheStreet

From Intel's (INTC) $7.7 billion deal for McAfee (MFE) to Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and Dell's (DELL) ongoing bidding war for 3Par (PAR), tech M&A is back with a vengeance. So who's going to be next?

Networking, security and storage are three of the hottest areas today, according to experts, with Riverbed (RVBD), ArcSight (ARST) and CommVault (CVLT) all in the spotlight.

After a tough 2009, companies like IBM (IBM), HP, Dell and Intel now see a window of M&A opportunity, particularly given renewed uncertainty about the broader economy.

By Jim Cramer, TheStreet

Don't these tech companies today make you feel like a chump?

How many times did former CEO Mark Hurd tell you that Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) had the soup-to-nuts offerings necessary to own the whole information technology chain? I know Dell (DELL) said it, too, but I never believed that company, hence my initial reaction to the 3Par (PAR) bid. Now the whole shebang shows the farcical nature of the assurances we have received about HP and Dell and their "multiyear" growth rates.

I am not reassured, by the way, by the $10 billion repurchase that HP announced. We all know now that share buybacks have largely been failures -- particularly in tech -- when it comes to keeping stock prices higher. Only dividends have worked.

And both HP and Dell, in my opinion, work lower, not higher, in large part because of this ridiculous, embarrassing bidding war. Can't they do something better with their cash?

It's by no means a done deal -- nothing is in South Africa these days -- but Nedbank, the South African bank majority owned by insurer Old Mutual (ODMTY), is HSBC's (HBC) deal to lose. 

HSBC beat out rival Standard Chartered (SCBFF) for the right to hammer out a formal offer to acquire South Africa's fourth-largest bank over the next two months. I think HSBC will pull it off. 

Old Mutual owns 51% of Nedbank and the insurer is a motivated seller because the company is selling assets to pay down debt. HSBC won't be able to gain 100% of Nedbank's outstanding shares because South African law reserves a percentage of shares for black investors, but the company should be able to gain the 70% of shares that it has said will let it achieve its strategic goals.

By Bryan Perry, editor of Cash Machine

OK! I get it. Just when the American consumer is about to throw in the proverbal towel on the economic recovery, Dell Inc. (DELL) and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) erupt into a classic black-heart-of-capitalism, knock down, drag out, donnybrook of a bidding war over data warehousing upstart 3PAR (PAR), a Silicon Valley-based company that is an early entrant in the much-ballyhooed cloud computing, virtualization, optimization revolution. Damn the consumer, business is business!

The main driver behind the bidding war comes down to the reality check of dealing with the onslaught of downloading complex digital/video content and new smartphone technology that clogs onsite data storage banks, drastically slowing data retrieval because of cyber bottlenecks. Cloud computing alleviates network overload and facilitates high-speed retrieval of bandwidth-hogging data banks. 

But after the 3PAR dust settles, the real question is: Who's next in tech?

By Anthony Agnello, InvestorPlace.com

Google (GOOG) was already making cable television providers nervous with its set-top box software, Google TV. Now major media companies should be downright terrified.

According to a report at the Financial Times, the ever-popular Google-owned video hosting website YouTube will soon begin offering pay-per-view rentals of major Hollywood films.

The unnamed on-demand service will be rolled out to American Internet users before an international launch. While pricing may change prior to launch, streaming movies will cost $5 per viewing.

And that's only the beginning of the Internet giant's push into digital broadcasting.

By Don Dion, TheStreet

ETF investors will be watching to see what steps will be taken to deal with inflationary problems in Vietnam and the troublesome rise in Japan's yen. Here are five exchange-traded funds that may make a move this week.

1. Market Vectors Vietnam ETF (VNM)

I have often looked to Vietnam as a promising frontier market. However, recently, the nation has faced pressure as its government takes bold steps in an effort to rein in its growing trade deficit, while at the same time preventing against the threat of inflation.

In response to the actions taken by the nation's leaders, the Vietnam ETF was pounded throughout most of last week, at one point testing new all-time lows.

By Jake Lynch, TheStreet

The S&P 500 ($INX) has tumbled 5.6% in the past month as weak data have spurred a migration into bonds. But not all stocks have suffered in the sell-off. Here are five that have made big gains during the correction. Excluded from the list are telecom and utility stocks, which have countercyclical appeal because of their steady performance and large dividends.

5. The world’s largest online retailer, Amazon.com (AMZN), gained 5.5% over the past month. Second-quarter profit soared 45% to $206 million, or 45 cents a share, as revenue gained 41%. The operating margin narrowed from 4.7% to 4.5%. Amazon.com has $5.1 billion in cash and $132 million in debt.

AMZN trades at a forward earnings multiple of 35 and a book value multiple of 9.6, premiums to indices, but modest discounts to Internet retail peer averages. Roughly 54% of analysts covering Amazon.com rate its stock "buy." A median target of $142.69 implies a return of 15%.

Starbucks (SBUX) made a huge splash recently with its line of Via Ready Brew coffee, which tallied $100 million in sales after only 10 months on the market. The Via packets have been a big hit because of their portability, a relatively low price of $1 a drink and, of course, a Starbucks-quality flavor.

With the instant-coffee marketplace expanding to upwards of $300 million thanks to Via, Starbucks is now looking to take its Ready Brew technology to the next level with a new line of flavored drinks.

But is the move diluting Starbucks business?

By Jim Cramer, TheStreet

Who is bullish on their American prospects these days? Who is unrestrained about the opportunities here? I have found one company, one company that has more demand than it can handle -- besides Apple (AAPL) -- and that's Hain Celestial (HAIN).

A series of meat and egg recalls coupled with the overarching trend toward combating obesity has got this company on a multiyear growth path, even as people somehow think it can't shoot straight.

Hain makes all sorts of high-end, healthful, organic products, including teas, snacks, baby food and cleaning supplies. In each case, it distinguishes itself by ethos: It won't produce something unless it is best-of-breed good for you. That is why it has more than 1,800 stock-keeping units in Whole Foods (WFMI), which itself is doing phenomenally well.

It's no secret that individual investors have been taking big chunks of money out of stocks since the market turned downward in late April -- according to the Investment Company Institute, investors removed a net of more than $46 billion from U.S. equity mutual funds from the beginning of May through mid-August. (Mutual fund flows serve as a pretty good proxy for individual investors; at the end of 2009, more than 91% of U.S. equity mutual fund assets belonged to individual investors, according to ICI.)

Interestingly, however, individual investors as a group weren't even all that keen on stocks during the big rally that began in March 2009. In fact, investors collectively were net sellers of U.S. equity funds from the beginning of April 2009 through April 2010, pulling a net of about $6.8 billion from the funds, according to ICI's data. During the same period, the S&P 500 was gaining almost 50%.

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Those numbers indicate that institutional investors -- hedge funds, endowments, etc. -- led the rally that followed the deep bear market of 2007-09. And institutions have continued to buy stocks this summer while the market has struggled. According to the research group Lipper, institutional investors added more than $13 billion to world equity funds in June and July while many individual investors were running from stocks.