CME Group (CME) fell short of analysts' fourth-quarter profit expectations on Thursday, with the firm reporting earnings of $3.37 per share, compared to consensus expectations for a profit of $3.43 per share. This morning, two brokerage firms expressed their post-earnings skepticism by handing out price-target cuts.

Specifically, KBW lowered its forecast from $360 to $350, while Susquehanna chopped its price target from $370 to $345. Shares of CME finished Thursday at $269.29, so both brokerage firms are still anticipating some healthy gains from the stock during the next year. In fact, both targets exceed the equity's average 12-month price target of $342.35, as reported by Thomson Reuters, which implies expected upside of more than 27% from yesterday's close.

Bright and early Tuesday morning, Credit Suisse issued upgrades to Motorola (NYSE: MOT) and Research in Motion Limited (NASDAQ: RIMM), lifting both of them from Neutral to Outperform. The brokerage cited a recovery at MOT's mobile-phone division along with growing demand for RIMM's BlackBerry as reasons for the upgrades. In addition, Credit Suisse elevated the price targets on both, upping MOT to $9.50 from $7 and RIMM to $95 from $76.

Credit Suisse did not stop there, issuing downgrades to MOT and RIMM competitors QUALCOMM (NASDAQ: QCOM) and Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU) from Outperform to Neutral.

Shares of online retailer Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) are trading a bit higher this afternoon after being upgraded today by Susquehanna Financial.

Susquehanna Financial analyst Marianne Wolk raised her rating on the stock this morning to a "positive" from a "neutral" rating and put a $100 price target on the company. The stock is currently trading up 1.7% on the day to $76.91, up $1.28.

Jim Cramer came on CNBC's Mad Money tonight and continued his "individual price targets for individual DJIA components." He is using these to justify his 'next 1,000 point' move that is coming on DJIA, but tonight's list was much less robust. In fact, he even panned a few DJIA components.

On Tuesday evening, Cramer was mostly positive on his second list of DJIA components, but he was very positive on Monday night's list where it almost seemed like Cramer was going to just issue bullish targets on every DJIA component.

If you read the post from yesterday, you'll notice that I thought Cramer was perhaps throwing darts at the dartboard to come up with a target for every DJIA component. The short interest from the DJIA components has gotten so high for May that some of Cramer's wild price targets could maybe be hit by the short covering alone if the shorts decide they can't take it anymore. Fortunately, Cramer isn't acting like a dart thrower on all of them.

Jon Ogg can be reached at jonogg@247wallst.com; he does not own securities in the companies he covers.

Jim Cramer is giving us individual targets for ALL 30 of the DJIA components this week. This is a sum of the parts where he can show you how he came up with his robust DJIA target still 1,000 points higher than today. This is the first batch of the stocks he gave on Monday, and after that you can look at the second batch from Tuesday. There are 11 in total.

What is interesting is that coming up with a multi-strategy call for 30 stocks is just dangerous, even if they are all DJIA components. The economy is a moving set of parts and making this many targets is odd. Cramer is probably using a blended analysis of various top analyst targets out there, or maybe it is just a Two For The Money scene where 'John Anthony,' in his alter-ego state, makes one of the assistants pick targets blind. I don't think Cramer would do that, but when you see one team's efforts all being funneled through even Cramer -- you just have to wonder.

The one thing that may help Cramer is the short selling. We have seen some unbelievable increases in short selling over the last month. Take a look at the full short interest review of the 28 NYSE-listed DJIA components. You might be as surprised as I was to find that only four of these saw a drop from April to May.

Jon Ogg can be reached at jonogg@247wallst.com; he does not own securities in the companies he covers.

We witnessed a couple of weeks of extreme volatility in the stock markets worldwide. No question, it was gut-check time on many levels. Are we imploding on subprime mortgages? Is China going to institute a 20% capital gains tax on stock profits? Is the interest rate environment going to change? For the better or the worst? What is Alan Greenspan saying out there now that he is not muzzled? All of these factors and emotional chasms were thrown at the investing world this past week.

I had the pleasure of being in London this past week, visiting 11 different professional portfolio managers that I have worked with the past 16 years. Combined, these managers run over $80 billion in U.S. stock funds. The one consistent principal that I heard used the most often was "price target." Meaning, separate the noise and the confusion about the markets, and getting back to the individual stock (company).

Why did you buy that particular company's stock? What was the growth target for revenues and earnings? Are the gross and profit margins intact, contracting, or expanding? What is the market share of this particular company? How big is the addressable market place for this company, domestic and worldwide? And finally, what is the price target on the stock.

The beauty of having a firmly established price target, both upside and down, is it should force a conversation and reevaluation of the underlying fundamentals as that stock approaches the price. It does not mean automatically sell the shares; what it means is its time reevaluate. So Asia is in turmoil, what does this do to my holdings in Medtronic Inc. (NYSE:MDT)? Or my holdings in Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE:HPQ)? Bring the surrounding environmental happenings right back to the individual company under scrutiny.