With today's sell-off, we have given up most of the year's gains on the Dow, but the Nasdaq is still in the positive.

Microchip Technology (MCHP) warned late yesterday that Q3 sales would drop 29 percent to 31 percent from the preceding period. The company’s CEO says that economic and semiconductor industry conditions have continued to decline since its October earnings call. The company said it is continuing with a pay cut for all of our worldwide non-manufacturing employees [...]

Among the companies whose shares are expected to see active trade in Wednesday's session are Alcoa, AMD, Cabot Micro, Ethan Allen, Family Dollar, Microchip Technology and Satyam.

Among the companies whose shares are expected to see active trade in Wednesday's session are Bed Bath & Beyond, Constellation, Monsanto and Alcoa.

Microchip Tech Expects Earnings Of 21 To 24 Cents a Share

With the landscape littered with tech deals gone awry, we thought it might be worth mentioning a few significant transactions that, lo and behold, actually made it to closing Monday....

Sellers appear to be gaining the upper hand, as selling gained momentum in the second half of US trading yesterday, and Asian markets sold off overnight. While it is a bit premature to call the end of the rally, given yesterday's volume, a few factors indicate that we may resume our downtrend soon: - Momentum appears to be shifting. European markets are also lower this morning in early trading. - Individual chart setups are increasingly favoring short sellers. - Sentiment seems to have shifted too quickly toward bullishness. Investors have been too hasty in calling a bottom here, as Mish Shedlock discusses in his column Unrelenting Bullishness. - Overall, the volume of this rally has been rather weak. - MT earnings disappointed yesterday, prompting a reversal in commodity stocks. Oil also gave up its[More...]

Goldman Sachs is out with a interesting downgrade to Sell on Microchip Tech (NASDAQ:MCHP) noting their checks indicate the market is starting to shift away from its core strengths, leading them to reevaluate the story. Firm says they have done extensive field work on the microcontroller market, prompted in part by Microchip’s proposal on October 2, 2008, to acquire Atmel’s MCU business. They have conducted more than a dozen meetings and calls with industry participants and contacts. They also spent two full days at the Embedded Systems conference in Boston on October 27-28, meeting with dozens of companies in the MCU ecosystem to garner insight into the state of the market. The slowdown in Microchip’s core growth and impact from increasing competition in MCUs is at the center of the downgrade to Sell from Neutral as well as a reduction in estimates and price target.<br[More...]

We're still waiting to see whether Microchip Technology Inc. [MCHP] and ON Semiconductor Corp. [ONNN] will come back at Atmel Corp. [ATML] with a sweetened takeover offer. Despite the fate...