By Rex Crum, MarketWatch
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Tech stocks' early gains were
slipping away in late trading Tuesday, with Apple Inc. remaining
one of the few sector bellwethers still in positive territory
following a Wall Street analysts' rating upgrade.
Apple (AAPL) rose 1.2% to $537.23 after Andy Hargreaves of
Pacific Crest Securities raised his rating on the company to
outperform, or the equivalent of buy, from sector perform and set a
price target of $635 a share on Apple's stock. In a research note,
Hargreaves based much of his upgrade on prospects for iPhone sales
and the next model of the iPhone, which is likely to come out later
this year.
Hargreaves said a larger-screen version of the so-called iPhone
6 is "likely to drive estimates higher" for Apple, and could add as
much as $4 a share to the company's per-share earnings in its 2015
fiscal year "if 35% of iPhone customers choose a larger iPhone when
they upgrade and Apple is able to capture 10% of the large-format
Android market."
Facebook (FB) turned back from its early gains to shed 58 cents
a share and trade at $71.46. Analyst Ken Sena of Evercore Partners
raised his price target on Facebook's stock to $64 a share from
$60, mostly due to the enterprise value opportunities from its
acquisition of WhatsApp.
Twitter Inc. (TWTR) was up by 39 cents a share at $54.28. The
microblogging site was down for about 30 minutes Tuesday due to
what was termed a "service issue."
Small gains also came from online retailer Zulily Inc. (ZU),
Zynga Inc. IBM Corp. (IBM) and Microsoft Corp. (MSFT)
Fusion-io Inc. (FIO) rose 1.2% to $11.79 a share. Pacific Crest
analyst Brent Bracelin said the flash-memory storage technology
company is seeing more interest in its products from tech resellers
and partners.
The Nasdaq Composite Index (RIXF) fell almost 32 points to 4,302
and the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index (SOX) was also in the
red.
More tech news from MarketWatch:
Google's gigabit gambit isn't going away
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