One-Week Wall Street Rally Lifts Cloud Stocks

A strong week in the financial markets was enough to push the Talkin’ Cloud Stock Index to its first solid weekly win in a month, posting 5.52% growth for the week ending March 25, 2011. We’re not ready to call it a long-term rally yet – the 20 cloud and SaaS companies that make up the index have been on a streak of very minor twists and turns since Valentine’s Day. But a little bit of sunshine comes in when you realize that not a single provider we track saw their stock price fall last week.

Before we take a closer look at the leaders of the pack, let’s run through the boilerplate: we only maintain the Talkin’ Cloud to match SaaS hype against real-world fiscal performance. We don’t offer any specific financial advice, and whether you buy, sell, or hold is up to you and you alone.

Royal Flush

• SaaS marketing specialist Constant Contact (CTCT) rose a head-turning 17.38% to $35.26/share on the analyst revelation that they had plenty of potential for short squeeze and short covering, which can shoot a stock’s price up dramatically.
• Citigroup Analysts began coverage of cloud business execution software vendor SuccessFactors (SFSF), propelling their stock price upwards to the tune of 9.40% percent. In fact, SuccessFactors hit a 52-week price high $38.68 at midday on Friday before closing for the weekend just a little bit lower at $38.05.
• On the exact same note, cloud talent management solution developer Taleo (TLEO) rose 9.02% to $34.45 per share on the news that Citigroup Analysts would be covering them, too. And in the same way, that announcement launched them to a short-lived new 52-week high of $34.71 before settling on that price.
• VMware (VMW) didn’t have any major analyst coverage to announce. But it looks like the virtualization solution specialist was able to ride the overall wave of market growth to a solid 8.33% growth to $81.04 per share. All the same, VMware is down an overall 8.85% so far this year.

The market hasn’t exactly reconstructed itself entirely after the disaster and ongoing response in Japan. But things weren’t nearly as bad as they could have been. And again, it’s too soon to call this a return to the steady cloud stock growth we saw in the first weeks of 2011.

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