5 of Last Week's Biggest Winners

What's better than momentum? Mo' momentum. Let's take a closer look at five of this past week's biggest scorchers.

Source: Barron's.

Let's start with Zale. The high-end jeweler soared after coming through with a strong quarter. There was an unexpectedly strong 5.6% boost to Zale's comps, and even though it did post a loss, it was a lot less than what the pros were targeting. This isn't a seasonally potent period for jewelry sales, anyway, but the healthy pop in same-store sales is the stylish kind of bling that never goes out of fashion.

K12 moved to the head of the class after its better-than-expected fourth-quarter results. Revenue climbed 19% to $203.1 million, fueled by a 21% spike in its managed public schools business. The provider of online education solutions earned $0.06 a share. Wall Street was banking on only half that much.

K12 came under fire last year with questions about the effectiveness of virtual classrooms at the grade level, but enrollments aren't slowing. The company has seen its student base grow by 13% over the past year. 

It was another week of new highs for salesforce.com , as the cloud-based enterprise-software giant served up a blowout quarter. Salesforce has been able to grow quickly as it offers businesses cost-effective software solutions. Revenue clocked in 31% higher in its latest quarter.

Astex moved higher after receiving encouraging top-line data in a midstage trial for a treatment tackling acute myeloid leukemia. The treatment's overall remission rate was positive in the study of 67 patients. The path to take a drug candidate to market is a long one, but Astex has seven different clinical trials going on at the moment.

Finally, we have Splunk proving that there are big gains in Big Data. Splunk reported a 50% revenue surge, well ahead of its earlier projections and Wall Street expectations. Its adjusted deficit of $0.01 a share was also better than analysts were forecasting.

A beat these days isn't enough to move a stock higher, and that's why it's comforting to see Splunk raising its top-line guidance for the entire year. It now sees $275 million to $281 million in revenue, well ahead of its earlier $266 million to $274 million range.