But, I had been looking at various trading ideas and wanted to capture a shorter-term gain for a trading account. The market has been so tough this year. When the recent rally in the indexes started, I didn't want to become part of the group that was desperate to get in on the action, only to expose my portfolio to more risk than necessary. Believe me, when you're afraid of missing a rally, you just might end up with some bad timing.

"Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT), already a holding on our buy list, was added to Goldman Sachs' Conviction Buy List," says Bill Martin. In BullMarket.com, he offers the reasoning for his continued buy rating.

"Analyst Sarah Friar at Goldman recently raised her price target on the name to $29 from $25 saying, 'We are adding Microsoft to our Conviction List as we think the combination of better revenue drivers, improved expense management, and sizable cash balances provides more opportunities for bottom-line beats.'

"'Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, Bing, Xbox 360 and new Halo content, Office 2010, and the Azure Cloud provide renewed innovation beyond anything we have seen in multiple years,' Friar wrote.

Normally we think of revolutionary products created by start-ups or entrepreneurial minds just out of college, but the most talked about new projects of 2009 are being produced by some of the best known companies in the world.

Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN): With its massive online presence and a truly efficient business model, Amazon has become the largest online retailer in the world. It is now taking on a new business, web services, namely cloud computing (learn more HERE), called the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). While hosting this infrastructure and presenting e-commerce with a reasonably affordable alternative with no up-front costs, Amazon has taken an early lead in this space, with some believing its cloud computing business will one day overtake retailing. "Amazon will be like a book store that sells cocaine out the back door. Books will be just a front to sell storage and cloud computing." says Larry Dignan, Editor in Chief of ZDNet and Editorial Director of ZDNet sister site TechRepublic.

Billions of investment dollars are sitting on the sidelines for fear of entering the market at the wrong time and losing more money after taking a bath last year. However, the market seems to have hit bottom last March and many investors missed the 40% gain from that point to now.

Market prognosticators are spewing out opinions faster than the public can grasp, or understand. I choose to stick with basic fundamental value propositions and ignore the noise.

I have been buying for the past eight months and riding the market waves, good and bad, to huge gains -- so far. Maybe I will be giving some back, maybe not, but I have also been encouraging readers to take something off the table, in several recent posts.

Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) has engaged investment bank Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS) to help it unload digital agency Razorfish. Publicis (OTC: PGPEF) is looking for targets in the online ad space and could be a possible bidder.

Razorfish has been valued at $600 million to $700 million, based on a top line of approximately $400 million for its last fiscal year and peer margins of 12% to 13%. The company boasts 2,000 employees and clients that include Audi, Nike (NYSE: NKE) and Kraft (NYSE: KFT). Microsoft bought the company as part of a $6 billion deal to acquire aQuantive. At the time, Razorfish was known as Avenue A Razorfish, as the result of a merger sealed in the wasteland known as the "dotcom bust."

It's only a stopgap measure, everyone knows. It's a temporary reprieve for XP. Just the same, netbooks are allowing XP, the operating system Microsoft tore from its loyal public last year, to make a comeback.

Last year I tried to get a new computer but was so badly abused by Vista I took it back and reformatted my old computer so I could avoid the demanding operating system.

This week brings a small flurry of end-of-the-calendar-quarter earnings reports. And for the most part, the expectations of the analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters aren't very high. Companies expected to report declining earnings in the most recently concluded quarter include America's Car-Mart Inc. (NASDAQ: CRMT), Bed Bath & Beyond Inc. (NASDAQ: BBBY), ConAgra Foods Inc. (NYSE: CAG), Jabil Circuit Inc. (NYSE: JBL), Jackson Hewitt Tax Service Inc. (NYSE: JTX), Monsanto Co. (NYSE: MON), and Sonic Corp. (NASDAQ: SONC).

Tech giant Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT), long shunned by investors who sought out more aggressive growth opportunities, is gaining support from a number of observers who believe the shares are not only relatively safe, but a bargain at current levels.

As was noted in yesterday's Analyst Action Round-up, Goldman Sachs upgraded the stock to "Conviction Buy," with analyst Sarah Friar raising her price target to $29 on expectations that the company's next set of offerings will be innovative and well-received winners. Friar also believes that search is back in play, with Google Inc's (NASDAQ: GOOG) near monopoly there threatened by a surprisingly successful Bing.

I was looking around today for a stock to buy. I came up empty-handed. One of my ideas was Activision Blizzard (NASDAQ: ATVI). I was intrigued this week by reports that said the company wants to have the launch to end all launches for the next Call of Duty title. Quite frankly, I think there's a chance the company will succeed with this. So, naturally, my thoughts turned to shares of Activision Blizzard as a possible buy candidate. Although I already own the stock in a longer-term, taxed portfolio, I wanted a trade for my Roth IRA.

Well, I couldn't buy the company. It's up today (3% at the time of this writing), and I do not want to buy any stock when it's up. Not now, at any rate. The market has come too far too fast, in my opinion, and I want to trade carefully. But, while looking at Activision Blizzard, I came across this article from Ben Kuchera over at Ars Technica. He discusses comments made by the publisher's CEO, Bobby Kotick, on Sony Corporation (NYSE: SNE) and its PlayStation platforms.

• Stephens upgraded Old Dominion Freight (NASDAQ: ODFL) to Overweight from Equal Weight to reflect the financial problems at YRC Worldwide (NASDAQ: YRCW), which the firm believes could lead to market share gains. Stephens raised its target on Old Dominion Freight to $40 from $22.
• UBS expects SunPower (NASDAQ: SPWRA) to benefit from the U.S. residential solar segment as investment tax credits come available. The firm upgraded shares to Buy from Neutral and raised its target to $38 from $26.
• KeyBanc upgraded DPL (NYSE: DPL) to Buy from Hold based on valuation and potential upside from the Ohio approval of the rate settlement, 2010 guidance, and potential to use cash flow for accretive purposes.
• Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) was upgraded to Conviction Buy from Buy at Goldman.
• Carnival (NYSE: CCL) was raised to Equal Weight from Underweight at Barclays.
• South Financial Group (NASDAQ: TSFG) was upgraded at SunTrust to Buy from Neutral.

Cloud computing is a type of on-demand hosting services on the internet. Not only a necessity for mainstream e-commerce sites, it also increases efficiency, is scalable, and lowers expenses. The monetary savings may be misleading to consumers and businesses who do not fully understand the potential risks involved.

With a pay-as-you-go type structure, users are only charged for the amount of traffic, bandwidth, and memory used. Online businesses become more efficient by only utilizing the storage and space needed, while also being assured capacity for any usage increases. The buzz has been building for years, so cloud computing has attracted a diverse customer base, ranging from popular social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, to educational websites of Arizona State and Northwestern University.

Adobe Systems Inc. (NASDAQ: ADBE), provider of Acrobat Reader, Photoshop, and other desktop publishing software, is scheduled to discuss its second-quarter 2009 results today in a conference call featuring CEO Shantanu Narayen and CFO Mark Garrett at 5:00 PM ET. You can catch the live webcast of the call on the company's website.

For the quarter in which the San Jose, Calif.-based software and services provider announced collaborations with Facebook, Texas Instruments, and Level 3 Communications, analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expect the cash-rich company to report earnings of $0.35 per share, down 30.0% from the same period of the previous year. Revenue for the quarter ended May 29 is expected to have fallen 21.6% to $695.1 million. These numbers are in line with Adobe's previous forecast. Adobe's earnings have beaten analysts' estimates in the past five quarters by a penny or three per share.

Internet search titan Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) is apparently closing in on its goal to produce renewable energy at a price point cheaper than coal. In an interview with Reuters Tuesday, Google's green energy czar, Bill Weihl, said that the odds of success have improved during the past year, and predicted, "In three years, we could have multiple megawatts of plants out there."

After announcing in late 2007 its quest for "green" energy, the company's Google.org division began investing in solar thermal, geothermal, and wind technologies. The tech firm's keen interest in alternative energy sources was a contributing factor last year when President Obama named Google CEO Eric Schmidt as one of his advisers.