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: Siemens (NYSE:SI), Nokia (NYSE:NOK), Ericsson (Nasdaq:ERICY) and Whole Foods Market (Nasdaq:WFMI).

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

Here are highlights from Monday's Analyst Blog:

Note on Siemens/Nokia

Today, Siemens (NYSE:SI) and Nokia (NYSE:NOK) announced a joint venture to combine their communications service businesses. This combination will create the third-largest telecom equipment maker in the world, behind Alcatel/Lucent and Ericsson (Nasdaq:ERICY), and will be called Nokia Siemens Networks. This 50-50 joint venture will consist of Nokia's Network Business Group and Siemen's Carrier-related operations for fixed and mobile networks, which generated combined pro-forma revenues of EUR 15.8 billion in calendar 2005.

We believe this is a good move for Siemens, as the company has continued to have trouble maintaining profitability in this business, and the combination will have a strong position in the fixed-mobile convergence market, one of the fastest-growing telecom markets. Additionally, the combined company should be able to realize cost synergies of over EUR 1.5 billion annually by 2010 that was mentioned on the conference call, as we expect the combined companies to be well positioned in emerging markets and there will be ample cross-selling opportunities. We continue to rate Siemens a Buy.

Buying Opportunity at WFMI

Whole Foods Market's (Nasdaq:WFMI) stock price has sold-off along with rest of the market since May 10. Its shares now stand at roughly 22% below its 52-week high of $79. In our view, this pullback in WFMI represents a buying opportunity. As a result, we are upgrading WFMI shares from Hold to Buy.

The company's business continues to fire on all cylinders thanks to its aggressive store expansion and impressive same-store sales growth. While its P/E multiple is a still-high 45x fiscal 2006 estimates, the stock warrants a premium multiple because of its consistently strong growth in sales and earnings. Our target price is $75, or 44x-45x our fiscal 2008 EPS estimate.