Analyst Upgrades

• Merriman upgraded Regal Entertainment (NYSE: RGC) to Buy from Neutral as the analyst is less concerned about Q2 box office performance following the Transformers 2 opening weekend.
• Baird upgraded Ball (NYSE: BLL) to Outperform from Neutral and raised its target to $52 from $46 citing cost cutting initiatives, a volume trough in Q1, and expected earnings growth.
• Morgan Stanley upgraded JCPenney (NYSE: JCP) to Overweight from Equal Weight. The firm cites valuation and gross margin opportunity for the upgrade. The firm has a $35 target on shares.
• KB Home (NYSE: KBH) was raised to Neutral from Underperform at Credit Suisse.
• Cognizant (NASDAQ: CTSH) was upgraded to Market Perform from Underperform at Wachovia.
• Lloyds Banking (NYSE: LYG) was upgraded to Conviction Buy from Neutral at Goldman.

IPO. Initial public offering. Or as they used to be known among the Wall Street cynics: "It's probably overpriced." Not any more. Nothing that is too expensive will fly these days. In fact, if it's not a bargain, don't bother to talk with the bankers. Investors want history, especially ones with increasing sales and profits.

The year 2009 has already produced more IPOs than all of 2008. Sound impressive? Here are the numbers: this year there have been seven. So there aren't a lot of companies going public right now, but still, there are some. And most of them are doing well.

OpenTable Inc. (NASDAQ: OPEN) came into the world with a bang on Thursday, shooting from $20 a share to a peak of $33 before settling down for the week at $28.75. A 44% gain makes this the second strong initial public offering (IPO) for a venture-backed company, following the SolarWinds Inc. (NYSE: SWI) debut the day before.

Originally, OpenTable planned a price range of $12 to $14, which crept up to $16 to $18, and eventually to its final level of $20.

Today was a day marked by selling, partly on economic news and partly on a call from S&P. S&P put the credit bias of the United Kingdom at "negative" from "stable" giving the notion that the nation's Triple-A ranking is possibly at risk to be cut. Then came the implications from Bill Gross and others that the U.S. could ultimately see the same fate. To show how bad the trend and bias was, long-dated Treasuries saw their yields rise as much as 15 basis points today.

A slightly less-bad jobs report failed to catch any attention today. In short, if you are a market bear you are getting more feathers in your cap now that earnings are basically finished. Here are today's unofficial closing bell levels:

Dow 8,291.82 -130.22 (-1.55%)
S&P 500 888.23 -15.24 (-1.69%)
Nasdaq 1,695.25 -32.59 (-1.89%)

Top Analyst Calls

Oil and Gas giant Occidental Petroleum Corp. (NYSE: OXY) has had a nice 2% jump this morning following the company's announcement that its fourth quarter profit surged 56%.

It really shouldn't come as too much of a surprise that the company was able to rake in strong earnings considering just how high oil prices were during the fourth quarter. Occidental had been expected to show earnings this morning of $1.69 and surprised Wall Street with actual earnings of $1.74.

For the full year, the company posted its strongest ever yearly numbers. The full year profit came in at $5.4 billion, which is 28.9% higher than the $4.19 billion profit that the company realized in 2006.

Jim Cramer may deserve a lot of praise, but in our analysis consistency is not one of his strong points. Tonight on MAD MONEY he looked into his crystal ball and showed us the future. Before seeing the future, though, he had to take us to the past ... not far, naturally. Just back to Monday morning, and pretend you owned Open Solutions Inc. (NASDAQ:OPEN). If you did own OPEN, you would have been up $7 on the buyout.

What is he finding in his crystal ball? No, it's not Dorothy and her little dog, too. It's "THE NEXT OPEN."

He says the next OPEN is S1 Corporation (NASDAQ:SONE). He said that Carlyle and another private equity group is buying OPEN,and they may sell some off and keep some. Private equity firms, he says, are the buyers of last resort these days. Not only that, but they tend to parrot one another. If you were a private equity firm, and you were looking for something like OPEN, you would find SONE. SONE offers solutions instead of just software, and three-quarters of the company's business is recurring.

He also wanted to go over the fundamentals. SONE dropped the ball with no growth in 2005, and he thinks they are back on track in 2006. Cramer said if you start adding this in after a couple days it will work. He said they also have some tax credits that will keep it from paying out too much in taxes.

SONE closed down 0.8% today, but shares have now jumped more than 15% to $5.80 in after-hours trading.

So much for Cramer's attitude of "We don't want to buy stocks just because they could be buyout candidates."

Jon Ogg is a partner in 24/7 Wall St. LLC; he does not own securities in the companies he covers.