5 of Last Week's Biggest Winners

It was a strong week on Wall Street, with the Nasdaq and Dow moving nicely higher, but there were plenty of stocks really making some serious moves. Let's take a closer look at five of this past week's biggest scorchers.

Source: Barron's.

Let's start with SolarCity. The Elon Musk-led installer of solar panel energy systems moved higher after announcing the acquisition of a solar module start-up. Paying what could be as much as $350 million for Silevo excited the market, because it suggests that SolarCity is trying to improve its costs as it ramps up installations through vertical integration. 

BlackBerry moved higher every single trading day last week, but things truly picked up on Thursday and Friday, after it posted better-than-expected quarterly results. Yes, BlackBerry continues to lose market share. There's a lot of red ink, and the year-over-year plunge in revenue is brutal. However, BlackBerry was able to achieve sequential stability for the most part, leading investors to wonder if the smartphone pioneer was finally bottoming out. 

GW Pharmaceuticals investors got a buzz after the biotech with a proprietary cannabinoid product platform revealed encouraging physician reports of efficacy and safety data for its drug candidate that aims to control seizures for young patients who haven't responded to current anti-epileptic drugs. The promising treatment that utilizes some components of marijuana without getting patients high will go into the third and final phase of clinical testing next year. 

GW Pharmaceuticals then got a double dose of publicity on CNBC later in the week. Its CEO appeared on Fast Money, and Jim Cramer sang the praises of GW Pharmaceuticals on Mad Money. 

Nuance Communications heard a rallying cry after The Wall Street Journal reported that it may be in talks to be acquired. The voice recognition specialist would make sense on the arm of Samsung or private equity firms that could make better use of Nuance's niche leadership.

Finally, we have ChannelAdvisor on the way up. The provider of cloud-based e-tail solutions bragged about its success with one of its clients. It claims that it helped Cooking.com's overall marketplace sales by 254%, with its eBay sales more than quadrupling over the past year.