Amazon misses revenues, misses earnings, lowers 1st quarter guidance and stock surges 9% after hours after announcing an operating income of $405 million. Gee, Amazon makes $400 million stock surges $4 billion in market cap. Apple makes over $23 billion in operating earnings and stock loses $56 billion in market cap.
ECONOMIC VIEWA New Housing Boom? Don’t Count on ItBy ROBERT J. SHILLERPublished: January 26, 2013We are beginning to hear noises that we’ve reached a major turning point in the housing market — and that, with interest rates so low, this is a rare opportunity to buy. But are such observations on target?Enlarge This Image Minh Uong/The New York TimesEnlarge This Image Minh Uong/The New York TimesIt would be comforting if they were. Yet the unfortunate truth is that the tea leaves don’t clearly suggest any particular path for prices, either up or down. via Housing Market’s Future Still Has Many … Read more
A Jaw-Dropping Statistic On The Difference In Profitability Between Apple And Amazon Jay Yarow | Jan. 24, 2013, 11:43 AM | 90,515 | Heres Why The Market Loves Amazon And Hates AppleWall Street Analysts React To The Apple Earnings Armageddon No Phablet For You, Says Apple CEO Tim Cook We just explained why the market currently loves Amazon and hates Apple.One of the reasons this drives Apple lovers crazy is that Apples profits are significantly bigger than Amazons.”Significantly” might not be a strong enough word for the difference between the two companies profits. via Amazons Profits Versus Apple – Business … Read more
Missed the Big Fight? Watch It Now Bill Ackman and Carl Icahn square-off live and insult each other on CNBC’s “Fast Money Halftime” over a past deal gone bad and disagreements about current investments in Herbalife. This is the complete, unedited conversation. Call them the “Bickering Billionaires,” two financial titans who squared off in a breathtaking, unforgettable smackdown Friday on CNBC. Bill Ackman, the head of Pershing Square Capital Management and its $12 billion in assets, squared off against Carl Icahn, the fellow activist investor and one of the richest men in America with an estimated fortune of nearly $15 … Read more
When a company as rich and valuable as Apple falls below private equity buy out values ,there are still no buyers. Eventually Apple will buy its own stock back. It’s not a broken company, at least not yet although it is a very broken stock now, whatever that means. The Wall Street Journal excerpt sums up my first impressions. Apparently, earning $13.1 billion in three months – the fourth-largest quarterly profit ever, mind you – is somehow a disappointment. Shares are down 6.3% in late trading amid heavy volume at $482. Apple reported earnings of $13.1 billion, or $13.81 a … Read more
Best Advice From The World’s Greatest Investors – Business Insider. I found this handy slide show presentation of investment nuggets. Very entertaining. I especially like the format of the idea with the picture of the idea maker. Kudus to Business Insider. I really like Henry Blodget. He’s on fire these days.
I don’t see the point in taking a needless loss. They should have made a larger size screen phone and I assume they will. When Google starts making a computer you really want to own then I’ll get worried but right now I don’t see how anyone can compete well with the whole Apple ecosystem. but then again there are a lot of people that don’t care that much about that but the counter to that is that the market itself is growing, Apple will innovate and at the multiple it’s trading at there is not much expectation for any … Read more
Of course the focus this weekend was on the NFL playoffs but we did try to put some reading time to work. JP Morgan’s trade of the week is going long GE into Friday’s earnings. Wow I hate playing anything for earnings as stocks are specially volatile around those events and for most people volatility makes you do something stupid. Instead, I’d analyze GE longer term and ask myself is this the kind of investment I want to own.
To many politicians, the deal that raised taxes on the wealthy and averted the fiscal cliff was a sellout, a cop-out, a Band-Aid — in short, nothing good. And now the debt ceiling showdown is looming. So why have stock investors cheered, pushing the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index to five-year highs? via Economic Experts Give Predictions for 2013 – NYTimes.com.
If we can’t bring you ideas to make you tons of money, at least we’re going to attempt to entertain you. If you haven’t tuned in yet, you should. Wall Street is now re-enacting the equivalent of King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962) – IMDb I’m talking about the Herbalife battle. We now have a small position in this stock, more from entertainment value than investing. I have always believed that Herbalife was a MLM scam but never did I think it was a Ponzi scheme. I just assumed many people are idiots. After all the vitamin and nutritional supplement business is a multi … Read more
What’s at the Center of the Debate Over Herbalife BY STEVEN M. DAVIDOFF In the wake of the bombshell announcement that Daniel S. Loeb’s Third Point has taken an 8.9 percent stake in Herbalife after the company’s shares were shorted by William A. Ackman of Pershing Square, the question is: Which very rich hedge fund manager is right? Is Herbalife a pyramid scheme as Mr. Ackman alleges and the nutritional supplements company heatedly denies, or is it a growth business model as Mr. Loeb seems to be betting? via What’s at the Center of the Debate Over Herbalife – NYTimes.com.
In their efforts to block health care reform, politicians often claim that the U.S. has the best health care system in the world. As such, we shouldnt tinker with it.The evidence, however, points to a different conclusion: the U.S. health care system provides less quality and less value compared to its international counterparts. The New York Times recently published an article that discusses the results of a comprehensive study convened by the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council on mortality rates and other measures of health care.The expert panel concluded that there is a ‘U.S. health disadvantage,’ according to … Read more
Really, Tim Cook. It’s time to put an end to the trading mania around your stock. My calculations today that $12.86 billion worth of stock that traded today was 58% of entire dollar volume ($12.86 billion)of the most popular ETF out there, the SPY. That’s just plain ridiculous and it wasn’t even an unusual volume day for Apple. Clearly the stock is now getting in the way of innovation,hiring, and retention of employees. Can you think of anything better to do with your mountain of cash than buy back your own stock. Apple is trading near 8 times earnings when … Read more
The 100 Most Successful Hedge Funds Of 2012Lucas Kawa | Jan. 4, 2013, 8:17 AM |The February 2013 edition of Bloomberg Markets Magazine features its ranking of the top 100 large hedge fundmanagers in the world.Unlike last year when the most successful hedge fundswere a variety of strategies — long/short, macro etc. — this years success stories mostly come from the world of mortgage bonds.This strategy provided an average return of 20.2 percent in 2012, far outpacing the industry average of 1.3 percent.The tiny average return was also far worse than the performance of the S&P 500, which provided a … Read more
Paulson, who manages $19 billion in hedge funds, said the euro would fall apart and bet against the region’s debt. Morgan Stanley predicted the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index would lose 7 percent and Credit Suisse Group AG (CSGN) foresaw wider swings in equity prices. All of them proved wrong last year and investors would have done better listening to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) Chief Executive Officer Lloyd C. Blankfein, who said the real risk was being too pessimistic. via Almost All of Wall Street Got 2012 Market Calls Wrong – Bloomberg.
I’m always looking for a reversion to the mean trade but this one is hard to grasp. They usually are though. Who would have thought the best performing sector in the market last year would have been homebuilders? By BRENDAN CONWAY | MORE ARTICLES BY AUTHOR Metals and mining companies, and coal producers, have been in a slump, given economic worries and sluggish commodities prices. But this year and next could see a revival in the industries’ fortunes, and their shares. How to play the comeback via ETFs. The global economy keeps chugging along with signs of a modest, but sustainable, recovery. … Read more
This is a checklist I use to quickly come to a conclusion on a stock. I score a stock, each line getting a 1, 0, or -1. A stock that scored 1 on each line would be a perfect 10. Buy it! Some of these items are quite subjective. For example how would I score Cash Flow? If a company’s cash flow is much lower than it’s reported earnings, that raises a flag and I would score it a -1. If there are more insiders buying than selling, I would score it a 1. If there are no apparent catalysts … Read more
Crony Capitalist Blowout In praising Congress’s huge new tax increase, President Obama said Tuesday that “millionaires and billionaires” will finally “pay their fair share.” That is, unless you are a Nascar track owner, a wind-energy company or the owners of StarKist Tuna, among many others who managed to get their taxes reduced in Congress’s New Year celebration. There’s plenty to lament about the capital and income tax hikes, but the bill’s seedier underside is the $40 billion or so in tax payoffs to every crony capitalist and special pleader with a lobbyist worth his million-dollar salary. Congress and the White … Read more
How well did Goldman’s top trades do in 2012? Giles Turner 21 Dec 2012 Every December, the analysts at Goldman Sachs publish their top macro trades for the coming year – an event that attracts much hype among the investment community. But how did the bank’s trades for 2012 pan out? If you slavishly followed Goldman Sachs trade recommendations of 2012, and allocated an equal weighting of your portfolio to each trade, you would have returned 1.6% over the 12 months since November 30, 2011, excluding transaction costs. In comparison, the Barclays Global Macro Index increased just 0.01% over the … Read more
This is a checklist I use to quickly come to a conclusion on a stock. I score a stock, each line getting a 1, 0, or -1. A stock that scored 1 on each line would be a perfect 10. Unlike Bo Derek was, it may be impossible to score a 10. For example if a company were to have a low PEG ratio, it might be because the company’s historic growth rate was low and scored a -1 with the analyst community. All items receive an equal weighting. Put it another way, I’ve never found a perfect 10. Some of these … Read more
Henry Blodget | Jan. 1, 2013, 11:25 AM | 11,826 | Things You Wont Believe That Are In The Fiscal Cliff Bill That The Senate Passed At 2 AM While Most Americans Were DrunkCongress Has Now Agreed To Raise Taxes On All Americans–Including The Middle ClassDEAR AMERICA: Here Are Your New Tax RatesMost of the attention around the Fiscal Cliff has been focused on income taxes.The way the deal went down, a tiny portion of American taxpayers — households that earn more than $450,000 per year — will see their income taxes rise modestly, from 35% to 39.6%. via Dividend … Read more
