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By Morgan Housel:

Shareholders of private-equity behemoth Blackstone Group (NYSE: BX) can revel in one inarguable fact: Management is smart. And not just number-crunching, spreadsheet-monkey smart … I mean really smart. How smart? Smart enough to have taken the company public just weeks before the credit crunch came to life -- pocketing billions and leaving shareholders with performance a mere fraction of what it used to be.

By Ryan Fuhrmann:

Staples (Nasdaq: SPLS) continued to prove why it's the savviest operator in the office supply business with this morning's first-quarter earnings release. Diluted earnings per share grew only a penny, to $0.30 for the quarter, but total sales managed a 6% boost in what is turning out to be a very challenging environment for retailers.

A box? Really, Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX)?

The leading DVD-rental-by-mail company is introducing a set-top box, easing the migration of its PC-based streaming service to your living room.

The knock on Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) is simple. It goes like this:

search.Search technology is in its infancy and will be transformed by upstarts that will wipe out any competitive advantage Google thought it had.

I was as shocked as I was nostalgic over last week's $1.8 billion buyout of CNET Networks (Nasdaq: CNET).

In football, sometimes it makes sense to give the ball to the big man, and sometimes it makes sense to give it to the little fast guy. When investing in today's bank stocks, the latter players seem better equipped to make the biggest plays.

Shares of Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) soared nearly 8% higher yesterday, fueled by a Goldman Sachs analyst upgrade.

Upgrading a retailer at a time when consumer discretionary-spending trends are coming under pressure is risky, but Amazon isn't just any retailer.

Software-as-a-service pioneer salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM) seems to have finally found its footing. After sliding for most of the first two months of this year, this Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) partner company got a big bounce after Q4 earnings in February and hasn't looked back since. Will it stop and take a peek when it reports its Q1 2009 numbers tomorrow, or just keep screaming ahead?

By By Morgan Housel:

It's not surprising that mimicking Warren Buffett's moves over the years would leave you well ahead of the pack. That's why it's great news that as an elephant-sized investment vehicle, Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRK-B) is required periodically to report some of its investment moves.

Target (NYSE: TGT) may be bucking some trends, but not in the way its shareholders would have hoped. While many high-profile discount retailers have done well in this sluggish economy, Target has seemed to stumble around recently.

Looks like the pilot program for Google 's (Nasdaq: GOOG) health records integration website with the Cleveland Clinic went well. The company launched Google Health yesterday.

By Ryan Fuhrmann:

Like its archrival in blue, orange-tinted home improvement giant Home Depot (NYSE: HD) continues to sputter through a challenging housing market. The problem is, Home Depot's woes appear to be more daunting than those faced by Lowe's (NYSE: LOW).

Akamai Technologies (Nasdaq: AKAM) is the kind of company that's easy for most consumers to miss -- despite the fact that they come face to face with it regularly.