CHICAGO -- Zacks.com announces the list of stocks featured in the Analyst Blog. Every day, the Zacks Equity Research analysts discuss the latest news and events impacting stocks and the financial markets. Stocks recently featured in the blog include: Fisher Scientific (NYSE:FSH), Thermo Electron Corp. (NYSE:TMO), Invitrogen (Nasdaq:IVGN), ABI (NYSE:ABI) and Waters Corp. (NYSE:WAT).

See the latest posts to the Analyst Blog by visiting http://at.zacks.com/?id=2673

Here are highlights from Monday's Analyst Blog:

Waiting on the Fed

All eyes will be on the Fed statement this week. Any change in syllable, punctuation or dialect will be analyzed to determine whether rates will or will not be raised again in late June.

Recent comments suggest the Federal Open Market Committee doesn't know what it will do in June. The problem, of course, is that the FOMC cannot say that it doesn't know if rates need to be raised even higher. Rather, the committee must use fancy wording such as "respond to changes in economic prospects." With Bernanke still trying to master Bernankese, it is very possible that the financial markets will be befuddled by the end of the week.

We can only hope that Ben walks into Wednesday's meeting with both a dictionary and a thesaurus.

Note on TMO/FSH Merger

Fisher Scientific (NYSE:FSH) and Thermo Electron Corp. (NYSE:TMO) announced a merger this morning, aligning two of the biggest players and creating quite a behemoth in the lab instrument space. This is probably a very strong sign of things to come in the device supply consumables space, as companies try and realign vendors with suppliers and customers. Customers, in particular, are downsizing the number of vendors they want to use, both in the hospital market and the lab space, partly due to reduced funding.

This deal looks to put other distributors in this space, such as Invitrogen (Nasdaq:IVGN), under the gun to find an instrument player to align themselves with, and probably sooner than they would have liked. Invitrogen does have ties with ABI (NYSE:ABI), though they are not formally aligned the way Fisher and Thermo were before the announcement, and therefore would not get the same cost synergies associated with this new deal. In truth, three or four years down the road, Invitrogen was likely to look toward some sort of merger with a company like ABI or Waters Corp. (NYSE:WAT), but today's news puts added pressure on the company to make a move.

Both Fisher and Invitrogen had put up some rather ho-hum earnings results recently, so we definitely see how this deal makes sense for Fisher to align itself with a major scientific driver in lab instruments. Also, it lowers the number of distributors in the marketplace. The deal is slated to close in the fourth quarter this year, and even though the merger should generate savings in the near term, we believe it will take some time before the new company sees the benefits. By 2007 or 2008, however, we should see this deal drive product synergies and greater usage.

See the latest posts to the Analyst Blog by visiting http://at.zacks.com/?id=2645

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