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AT&T, Verizon Reach Stock Buy Points; High-Rated Nvidia Rockets

Loading the player…   After three straight up days for the stock market through midweek, some top-rated tech stocks are flashing buy signals, and others are on the move. Graphics chip maker Nvidia ( NVDA ) jumped as much as 12% early Thursday after the Tesla Motors ( TSLA ) partner blew past estimates for the fourth quarter, as well as beating on guidance, with its Wednesday afternoon earnings report . Heading toward the closing bell Nvidia stock was up almost 9% for the day, near 30. The company gets a strong 93 Composite Rating out of a possible 99 from IBD, and while not yet in buy range, it is moving in the right direction. Wednesday, the company said Facebook ( FB ) and Alibaba Group ( BABA ) will use its accelerator technology for machine learning, an aspect of artificial intelligence. The S&P 500 index was down fractionally approaching Thursday’s closing bell, tempering the stock market rally this week. Telecoms Grab Top Ratings Sole IBD Leaderboard tech stock  AT&T ( T ) climbed into buy range above 36.55 as of Tuesday, from a recent base. It was up almost 1% ahead of the closing bell in the stock market today , near 37. Fund managers have increased holdings, drawn partly by AT&T dividends and the company’s stability as a defensive play. It gets a best-possible IBD Composite Rating of 99. That other big telecom, Verizon ( VZ ), also has a high dividend and gets a best-possible Composite Rating from IBD. Up more than 1% in afternoon trading, it rose into buy range today, just above a 50.96 buy point. Near the closing bell Verizon flirted with that number. It’s on IBD’s Big Cap 20 list, as is cable giant Comcast ( CMCSA ), expected to bid for wireless spectrum in a March FCC auction. Comcast could become a significant wireless provider, Mobilocity analyst Gerry Purdy said Wednesday. It’s about 9% under a buy point and was trading near 57 Thursday afternoon, down a fraction. Research this week from S&P Capital IQ analyst Lindsey Bell pegs telecom services as the leader in terms of Q4 earnings growth among 10 sectors it tracks, at about 20%. Verizon stock is up about 10% so far this year, and AT&T is 8% higher. Comcast is up about 2%, while Nvidia remains down 9%.

Tesla Partner Nvidia Delves Into AI With Facebook, Alibaba

Tesla ( TSLA ) partner Nvidia ( NVDA ) forged alliances during Q4 with Facebook ( FB ) and Chinese Internet major  Alibaba ( BABA ) for speedy artificial intelligence chips, Nvidia CFO Colette Kress said late Wednesday on the chipmaker’s earnings conference call. And tech giants Alphabet ( GOOGL ), Microsoft ( MSFT ) and IBM ( IBM ) also are eyeing AI, she said. The arena pits graphics processing units, made by Nvidia and others, against another type of chip called field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), to power the process. The trend — accelerated machine learning — is good news for GPU-maker Nvidia and Intel ( INTC ), which completed its acquisition of FPGA-maker Altera in December. Fostering AI requires breakneck speed in the data center. Nvidia stock rocketed as much as 12% Thursday, touching a six-week high near 31. Midday on the stock market today , Nvidia stock was up 9%, following Nvidia’s blowout Q4 earnings and its guidance leap. For its fiscal Q4 ended Jan. 31, Nvidia reported 35 cents earnings per share on a record $1.4 billion in sales, flat and up 12%, respectively, vs. the year-earlier quarter, and topping Wall Street expectations. Fiscal 2016 ended with $5.01 billion in sales and $1.08 EPS, up a respective 7% and 4%, to beat the consensus model of 29 analysts polled by Thomson Reuters. Nvidia guided above the consensus to $1.26 billion in sales, plus or minus 2%, for the current quarter. That would be up 9.5% year over year, but down 10% sequentially — a measure Rosenblatt analyst Kinngai Chan, in a research note, called “prudent and appropriate.” Chan sees weak China and Asia gaming demand slugging Nvidia in the first half of fiscal 2017. But gaming was the bright spot for Nvidia’s Q4, where sales flew 25% year over year to $810 million. GPU sales, Nvidia’s bread and butter, rose 10% to $1.18 billion. Nvidia Vs. AMD Pretty Close In the second half of the year, Nvidia could outperform after releasing its newest GPU generation, Pascal, says Chan. “We do not foresee any meaningful market share shifts and continue to see a benign pricing environment,” Chan wrote. Likewise, Pacific Crest analyst Michael McConnell doesn’t expect any major shifts in share between Nvidia and GPU rival Advanced Micro Devices ( AMD ). Both are deeply entrenched in the gaming world — Facebook-owned Oculus recommends GPUs from either to power its upcoming Rift VR games. “We believe further stock outperformance this year will hinge on company progress with PC GPU total addressable market expansion (VR) … given our belief that GPU share gains vs. Advanced Micro Devices have likely peaked,” McConnell wrote in a research note. He has a sector weigh rating on Nvidia stock. Automotive and data center sales remain healthy growth drivers for Nvidia — up 68% and 10% year over year, respectively — but they only comprise about 13%-14% of total sales, McConnell wrote. Sales stemming from Tesla and Nvidia’s joint accelerator chips are included in the data center total. Nvidia CEO Jen Hsun-Huang sees that as a potential boom market. During Q4, Nvidia announced a hyperscale data center platform that accelerates machine learning (AI). He sees the move to AI as “a brand new computing model.” “There are so many problems that computer science has been trying to solve, which algorithmically are just impossible to solve,” he told analysts on Wednesday’s call. “Using an enormous amount of data to train a neural net … is a pretty exciting computation model.”

Apple Pay Launching In China As U.S. Adoption Stalls

Loading the player… Apple ( AAPL ) Pay will be available in China beginning this Thursday, with the consumer tech giant facing stiff mobile payment competition in the world’s largest smartphone market from Chinese Internet heavyweights Alibaba ( BABA ) and Tencent ( TCEHY ). Alibaba’s Alipay is China’s most popular online payment service, while Tencent has integrated payments into its WeChat mobile messaging app, much like Facebook ( FB ). And amid concerns of slowing iPhone sales, a new study says that U.S. adoption of Apple’s mobile payment platform has plateaued. First Annapolis, an electronic payments consultancy, says that some 20% of iPhone 6 owners report using Apple Pay at least once, while 15% say that they use it regularly or frequently. While awareness among iPhone 6 owners remains high at 84%, the usage figures are slightly down from last year. In the U.S., Apple faces competition from Samsung Pay and Alphabet ( GOOGL )-owned Google’s Android Pay. Samsung Pay was launched last fall and works not only with NFC (near-field communication) terminals like the Apple and Android systems but also with magnetic stripe terminals and chip-card terminals, which could allow for wider adoption. Still, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster said at the start of the year that Apple is “overwhelmingly the share leader” in point-of-sale mobile payments. He expects new features like peer-to-peer payments and in-browser integration to further boost adoption in 2016. Shares are looking to continue higher with a 1.2% gain Wednesday after jumping 3% in heavy volume Tuesday. Apple is still in a downtrend, a little less than 30% below its all-time high reached last April. Alphabet advanced 1.8%. Apple stock could also be getting a boost from reports on Tuesday that it received a car-related patent for a mobile device sensor to “determine when the user is in a vehicle that is driving.” The news has sparked new speculation that Apple — along with Google, Tesla Motors ( TSLA ) and others — is working on a self-driving car.