Joseph Gacinga

OpenTable shares still look expensive even after the sell-off this year. The company issued guidance saying that its growth is going to slow down going forward, and this makes the shares less attractive.

eBay has dramatically increased its share buybacks this year, in what appears to be a move intended to appease Carl Icahn and Elon Musk. The buybacks might provide some lift to the company's stagnant shares.

DirecTV investors can use the cash they will receive when AT&T acquires the company to buy more AT&T shares. Alternatively, they can buy shares of AutoZone and/or AutoNation both of which have strong buyback programs similar to DirecTV's.

Traditionally, Google has invested excess cash in acquisitions. But, lately this hasn't been working very well, and the company will have to consider instituting a dividend program, or a substantial share buyback program, to keep shareholders happy.

Shares of HomeAway still look expensive even after their huge pullback this year. But can the frothy valuation be justified on the premises of the business' disruptive nature to traditional hotel booking and the company's potential for growth?

Salesforce.com's enterprise software sales are growing robustly, and have propelled the company to the top-ten list of biggest enterprise software vendors. However, the company sports very high levels of executive compensation as a percentage of sales, and marketing costs are unusually high.

EMC decision to acquire ScaleIO, whose features closely resemble those of VMware, was a good one. ScaleIO scales a lot better than VWare, and also supports a wider variety of servers. The company can, therefore, appeal to a wider market using the new platform. Meanwhile, EMC’s strong working relationship with Microsoft in the cloud could prove to be a major revenue boon for the storage equipment company since Microsoft’s cloud is growing the fastest among all major cloud services providers.

Weight Watchers is undertaking a drastic business-model restructuring to help it keep up with industry trends and stem the attrition in its membership base. Will these moves help the company reinvigorate its declining revenue?

Lately, Microsoft has been concentrating on building hybrid clouds after its initial failed attempt to take on AWS. This new strategy is proving to be very successful and is helping the company rapidly grow its cloud business and close the huge gap between it and AWS.

Johnson & Johnson shares look a bit overpriced. But the company has its attractions, including healthy dividend growth and a pipeline of new and promising drugs.

Although microservers are becoming increasingly popular with organizations where they are commonly used for handling static elements on high-traffic networks, they do not pose a threat to traditional high-end servers. Intel is, however, still keen on developing chips suited for low-power applications and will benefit if the market for microservers grows significantly in the coming years.

LinkedIn and Twitter both reported less-than-ringing quarterly reports. LinkedIn has been spending too heavily on marketing expenses.Twitter relies too heavily on its U.S. market to drive its revenue, while its international markets contribute just a quarter of its revenue. LinkedIn problems, however, look more temporary and the company is likely to outgrow them, while Twitter will have a harder time maintaining strong revenue growth once its U.S. market becomes saturated.This makes LinkedIn shares better long-term investments than Twitter shares.

Shutterstock shares have fallen more than 30% this year on valuation concerns by investors. However, the company has built a sound business model that looks likely to deliver healthy growth for years to come, so investors can use this pullback to gain fresh entry points.

Microsoft has now officially become the second largest cloud service provider after Amazon. Microsoft's cloud grew at a blistering pace in the first-quarter of 2014, and helped the company beat the chasing pack of IBM, Google and Salesforce for the second slot. At these growth rates, Microsoft can potentially become as big as AWS in 6-7 years. Meanwhile, IBM's strong cloud growth will help it offset declines in its overall business in as little as three years.

Although Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz recently said that the company does not intend to raise its coffee prices, the rising prices of other coffee ingredients such as milk and sugar might force it to do so. However, if Starbucks does raise its coffee prices this shouldn't hurt its stock price much.

Groupon recently launched Groupon Basics, a service that its customers can use to purchase 110 home items in bulk at discounted prices. But, the number of goods in the portfolio is likely to remain small and therefore pose little threat to Costco, the leading warehouse retailer.

Yelp's latest quarterly results showed that the company has continued to grow its revenue at an impressive pace, but still has negative earnings. This can be chalked up to its marketing expenses, as well as its operating expenses, which are growing in tandem with its revenue. The company might continue with this trend for a few more years unless it can manage to keep its marketing expenses down.

Splunk and Tableau Software shares have sold off by huge margins in recent times. Although it's difficult to establish whether Splunk shares have found their floor, their current growth-discounted EV/Sales multiple suggests that the shares are fairly valued.

TJX Companies has continued to thrive in the midst of the retail industry snafu, brought about by intense competitive pressure from online operations such as Amazon. The company has unique ways of sourcing its goods, which it is able to buy cheaply and pass huge cost savings to its customers. The company's shares are good long-term investments.

General Mills has a stellar record of consistent dividend payouts and robust dividend growth. But at its current price is the company really worth buying now?