While Delta Air Lines and and US Airways spent their fourth-quarter earnings calls extolling their 2012 results, United Continental was almost apologetic.

The big difference was the number of years since the carriers engaged in mergers. US Airways began a merger with America West in 2005, Delta began a merger with Northwest in 2008, and United began a merger with Continental in 2010. They all created problems, but United's problems were not only the worst but also the most recent, consuming the airline in 2012 even as Delta and US Airways soared and American Airlines worked its way through a largely successful bankruptcy reorganization.

United executives reiterated Thursday that not only did the merger bring higher cost and lower revenue in 2012, but also labor costs will rise in 2013 as a result of new contracts that resulted at least partially from the merger.

"Credit quality is a gift that keeps giving because stable and good credit quality allows management to focus on optimizing returns."

This is Oppenheimer analyst Chris Kotowski's assessment of the opportunity and necessity for banks at this point in the credit cycle. Despite the "headwind" from the prolonged period of historically low interest rates, the analyst's view for the big banks has been that "over time banks will manage themselves to earn a competitive return. It is simply not an option for them to accept a single-digit return when the rest of the market is earning, say, 14 percent. That is an unstable dynamic that would cause capital to leach out of the banking system."

The "three levers" that banks can pull to bring their returns in line with the broad market, according to Kotowski, include pricing, "expenses and scope of the delivery system" and capital deployment.

Fast-food giant McDonald'swarned on Wednesday that it expects global sales to be lower this month — a prediction that one analyst said investors should be eyeing along with clues from its production pipeline to gauge whether the company can get back on track.

Professional traders running mutual funds and hedge funds don't just look at a stock's price moves; they also track big changes in volume activity. Often when above-average volume moves into an equity, it precedes a large spike in volatility.

Major moves in volume can signal unusual activity, such as insider buying or selling — or buying or selling by "superinvestors."

Unusual volume can also be a major signal that hedge funds and momentum traders are piling into a stock ahead of a catalyst. These types of traders like to get in well before a large spike, so it's always a smart move to monitor unusual volume. That said, remember to combine trend and price action with unusual volume. Put them all together to help you decipher the next big trend for any stock.

At Stockpickr, we track daily portfolios of stocks that are the biggest percentage gainers and the biggest percentage losers.

Stocks that are making large moves like these are favorites among short-term traders because they can jump into these names and try to capture some of that massive volatility. Stocks that are making big-percentage moves either up or down are usually in play because their sector is becoming attractive or they have a major fundamental catalyst such as a recent earnings release. Sometimes stocks making big moves have been hit with an analyst upgrade or an analyst downgrade.

Regardless of the reason behind it, when a stock makes a large-percentage move, it is often just the start of a new major trend — a trend that can lead to huge profits. If you time your trade correctly, combining technical indicators with fundamental trends, discipline and sound money management, you will be well on your way to investment success.

We sit here puzzled every day about how Nokia or Hewlett-Packard or Best Buy or Research In Motion could go up over and over again on such little news.

To me, though, that's not the right observation. I think what's really going on is that they went down way too low in 2012, and all they are doing is recovering from some pretty hideous losses. In fact, I could argue that they never should have fallen to where they got to.

Let's start with Nokia. Here's a company that has a gigantic share of the cellphone market and even the smartphone market, with a terrific entry into China with its partner China Mobile. The stock fell to about $2 and stayed there, even as the company won the Chinese business, sold its headquarters to fix its balance sheet and laid off a huge number of employees to stem the losses.

Amgen reports earnings today, and some traders have already chalked up profits in the stock.

OptionMonster's tracking systems detected unusual activity in the February 80 calls, with buyers paying $2.91 to $2.97 early in the session. Long calls such as these lock in the price where investors can get buy stock, so they can generate big profits on a percentage basis in the event of a rally.

And that's exactly what happened yesterday in Amgen. The biotech giant started climbing shortly after the options traded, and those calls ended the session worth $4.10 — a gain of more than 35 percent. The stock rose less than 2 percent in the intervening hours, which illustrates the kind of leverage that options can provide.

The future blending of TV and computing is getting more interesting all the time.

According to a report from KurzweilAI.net, researchers at Akamai are busy working on a new technology that will automatically know what you're watching on TV and then stream secondary content to your smartphone or tablet.

Akamai is considered a Web optimization company. Its online servers handle as much as 30 percent of all Web traffic — including some of the most popular destinations on the Web.

The company says the idea is simple. It wants to create a standard for today's TV/Internet technology that lets users get scores and other facts on a small screen while watching a sporting event on the big screen or, for instance, police statistics and news reports while they're watching a crime show.

At the moment, second screen information is handled by separate apps for each TV broadcaster. Akamai's new system would negate the need for multiple apps.

Ratings company Nielsen says 40 percent of Americans are also using their smartphones/tablets/computers at the same time they're watching TV. Akamai thinks that it will be able to create a way to keep everything flowing faster and even more seamlessly than today's current methods.

Experts believe that the market for second-screen content could increase more than tenfold in the next three to four years.

Although Verizon's wireless subscriber base is growing faster than the industry, the stock is pricey and the company risks provoking a major reaction from competitors, says an analyst.

"The challenge is when one player is growing and everyone else is losing, that becomes a very precarious equilibrium," Craig Moffett, Sanford C. Bernstein senior telecom analyst, told CNBC on Monday.

JPMorgan Chase was active along with other banks on Friday as traders bet that there is still more upside in the name.

Buying hit our scanners early in the February 50 calls, with traders paying $0.08 and $0.09 for a quick 7,800 contracts. The activity would continue and volume would top 40,000 contracts by the end of the session, according to OptionMonster's tracking systems. Premiums also doubled to $0.17.

Those calls lock in the price where investors can buy shares. They can generate some nice leverage in the event of a rally, but also stand to become worthless if the stock doesn't move.