AMD Turns Off TVs

Shares of

Advanced Micro Devices

of its digital television chip unit to rival

Broadcom

Kaufman Brothers analyst Suji De Silva liked the deal for Broadcom, predicting it will profit from this opportunistic acquisition.

"We estimate Broadcom's internal effort had been challenged scaling to corporate margins given limited customer traction to date," he wrote, adding that this would explain why Broadcom was willing to lay out about 10% of its cash on hand to buy an existing business. "AMD's digital television business, on the other hand, likely had annual revenues in the mid-$100 million range and traction across most tier-1 DTV vendors." De Silva sees a nickel-per-share hit to Broadcom's 2009 earnings.

All those nickels will come in handy for AMD, whose shares have plunged from a peak of $14.73 last October to a recent low of $4.05 a 72% slide, though a sectorwide semi-rally has bolstered the stock in the last three weeks.

Dirk Meyer, who stepped into the CEO slot last week, said the sale would help the company focus on its computer chip business, where it competes with Intel. AMD has reported seven consecutive quarterly losses.

The Bottom Line: Hold

This is part of a much longer turnaround for AMD, and it's too early to say how that will unfold.

Quest for Probity

Shareholders siphoned funds from

Quest Resource

.

Shares plunged 28% after the board announced it had accepted the resignation of Jerry Cash, following an Oklahoma Department of Securities investigation of questionable transfers of company funds to an entity he personally controlled.

In a statement, the company also said it put CFO David Grose on paid administrative leave, and that the directors of the three autonomous business units of Quest had convened to assess the situation.

"The boards immediately formed a Joint Special Committee comprised of representatives from each board, including the chairs of the audit committees of Quest Resource Corporation and Quest Energy Partners, to investigate the matter and consider the effects on the companies' financial statements," Quest said.

David Lawler, chief operating officer of Quest Energy Partners, was named interim CEO.

The Bottom Line: Buy

Cash-n-Carry probe a problem, but this plunge won't last.

Rating Review Ruffles AIG

Shares of insurance giant

American International Group

It does not rate AIG Financial Products, a major source of recent quarterly losses reported by AIG.

"Today's rating action is not based on new information provided to Fitch by AIG, but rather on an updated assessment made by Fitch as part of its ongoing ratings review of AIG, its subsidiaries, and their inter-relationships and dependencies," the Fitch report said.

Meanwhile, Credit Suisse analyst Thomas Gallagher on Monday lowered his third-quarter earnings estimate for AIG to a loss of 86 cents, dropping his prediction from a 13 cents a share quarterly profit. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters previously forecast on average third-quarter profit of 75 cents a share, and a full-year loss of two cents a share.

The Bottom Line: Sell

As with the rest of the financial-services industry's crumbling pillars, look out below.