Corning (GLW), the world leader in specialty glass manufacturing and S&P 500 component, reported its latest earnings before the start of trading on Monday, resulting in a modest gain in GLW stock.
GLW — which also supplies Apple (AAPL) with Gorilla Glass for iPhones — reported first-quarter earnings of 31 cents per share, up 3% year-over-year and topping estimates of 30 cents. Core revenues also beat expectations with $2.39 billion, which beat the consensus expectation for $2.3 billion and represented an impressive 32% YOY improvement.
One of Corning’s areas that is often in close focus is its displays technologies unit, where sales were up 58% compared to the same quarter a year ago. The unit supplies the likes of LG and Sony (SNE), big players in the television and other displays market.
Looking to the second quarter, Corning sees further good sales growth. All of that together appeared to please investors at least mildly, and in turn, they drove a small 1%-plus gain in GLW stock Monday.
GLW Stock Charts
When looking for clues to momentum in stocks, besides the technicals, I have increasingly begun to pay more attention to social media activity around the name. Very simply, the more social media activity around a stock, the more it is “in play” and the more it could move. After Corning’s earnings announcement GLW social media mentions spiked significantly, and when I overlay this to the positive posture in the stock as I lay out below, the stock’s path of least resistance seems to be higher.
Corning’s long-term chart looking back to 2006 reveals a clear line of resistance which now could act as a next upside attraction point. Note that after GLW stock fell off a cliff in 2008, it fought back along with the rest of the market, and in summer 2012, it completed an important higher low vs. the late 2008 lows.
For the long-term chart to ultimately be even more bullish, GLW stock would now need to complete a higher high vs. the 2011 highs, which also could have the positive effect of (at the very least) bringing the stock back to the long-term diagonal resistance line, if not breaking the stock past this line.
On the daily chart, GLW stock has been respecting both its 50- (yellow) and its 100-day simple moving averages (blue). Since the second week of April, Corning stock has been finding resistance near the $21.30-$21.40 area, and this was once again the case in Monday’s trading.
However, I am very encouraged by the way GLW stock bounced off its intraday lows yesterday (understanding that part of this was due to the broader market rally in the afternoon session), which left a bullish hammer candle behind on the daily chart.
At this point, GLW stock very simply needs to break past the $21.30-$21.40 resistance area, at which point I would look to buy Corning for a move toward $23-$23.50 in coming weeks/months.
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Download Serge’s trading plan in the Essence of Swing Trading e-book here. As of this writing, he did not hold a position in any of the aforementioned securities.
