Summary: The likelihood of Novell revealing something about a takeover increases because the financial crossroad (quarterly report) arrives within a day

NOVELL has just been upgraded for some reason, maybe in anticipation of a takeover (Novell is up for sale). Novell recently warned that it would miss expectations, but it did turn out that Novell was still in the process of selling or going private (a similar thing).

As Motley Fool put it a couple of days ago, Singer's bid is something to remember.

For instance, Novell (Nasdaq: NOVL) received an unsolicited bid from hedge fund Elliott Associates back in March. Although the company rejected the bid, the stock has continued to trade near the bid price, which is much higher than where the stock traded before. Similarly, the fund owns shares of Qwest (NYSE: Q) in light of its being bought out by CenturyLink (NYSE: CTL) for $10.6 billion in stock.

Novell will probably report poor financial results at the end of Thursday. The presentation will depend on expectations, which Novell has already adjusted by lowering them (so there is no reason to be surprised if Novell beats its already-lowered expectations, which is a trick Microsoft always uses). This outlook which covers Novell is incorrect in the sense that it says: "Novell Inc., the Waltham-based open-source software developer, reports quarterly financial results."

As noted and shown in the previous post, Novell is a proprietary software developer, not an "open-source software developer" (that's just how Novell markets itself through endless repetition). Here are some more outlooks for Novell [1, 2, 3, 4, 5].

Novell (Nasdaq: NOVL) and A-Power (Nasdaq: APWR) check in Thursday. The two companies are in entirely different sectors -- Novell is the former networking darling while A-Power's specialty is wind turbines -- but they have one thing in common. Both are projected to post flat earnings growth Thursday.

We shall write about these results tomorrow night. ⬆