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Posted
Apr 22 2008, 04:43 AM
by
Douglas McIntyre
Rating:
Once a year, the firm Millard Brown puts out its BrandZ 100 Most Valuable Brands. The data used for the list come from consumer research and financial data on the companies. The research house gives its methodology here.
For those who think Google is the top brand, give yourself a pat on the back. It has a brand valuation of $86 billion, up 30%. For those research mavens in the crowd, the figure makes absolutely no sense. Google has a market cap of $168 billion. Most of that would go away -- no matter how good the technology is -- if it changed it name to Dawdle.
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Posted
Apr 16 2008, 04:57 PM
by
Charley Blaine
Rating:
I'm not making this up. Apple's market capitalization is bigger than Citigroup's. The actual numbers at today's close were $135 billion for Apple and $123 billion for Citigroup.
This fact, which came courtesy of Barry Ritholtz's blog The Big Picture, struck me as, well, preposterous. Check these most basic of comparisons:
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Posted
Apr 14 2008, 02:58 PM
by
Douglas McIntyre
Rating:
Early indications from companies like Wachovia and General Electric show that the last half of March may have been tougher on bank earnings than Wall Street expects. Bloomberg recently reported that Citigroup, JP Morgan, and Wells Fargo could all miss consensus estimates. But by how much?
A look at the spread of Q1 estimates gives some hint about how far off actual numbers could be compared with investor expectations. At Citigroup, among 15 analysts polled by First Call the average EPS estimate is a loss of $.95. But, the lowest estimate is a loss of $2.24. At JP Morgan, the average figure from fourteen analysts is $.66, but the worst case is a loss of $.11. For Wells Fargo, twenty-three analysts have an average forecast of Q1 EPS at $.57, but the low number is $.45.
The huge discrepancy among the numbers should be troubling to shareholders because recent information would argue that share prices for most banks and brokerages may still be way too high.
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Posted
Jan 29 2008, 02:08 PM
by
Douglas McIntyre
Rating:
The head of insurance regulation in New York is busy as a bee trying to bail out Ambac and MBIA. According to the FT, "Eric Dinallo, the New York state insurance superintendent, is being privately supported by the New York Federal Reserve Bank and other regulators." If the muni bond insurance companies go under it could lead to a new round of fixed income instruments write-offs which would hurt Wall Street balance sheets.
If the government is going to drag the muni bond insurance companies out of their mess, why not a little help for the likes of Citigroup, Washington Mutual, and Wells Fargo?
Mr. Dinallo is attempting to get the big U.S. banks to provide the bond insurers with $15 billion in credit to shore up their balance sheets. It is an interesting proposal but it does beg the question of where the cash-strapped banks will get the money. It could be the beginning of a 21st Century version of borrowing from Peter to pay Paul.
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Posted
Jan 18 2008, 04:12 PM
by
Matt Koppenheffer
Rating:
Earnings have been pouring out of the financial sector all week and the picture hasn't been pretty. "Write-down" has commanded a starring role in this quarter's earnings reports dashing ahead of "earnings per share" as what investors seem to care about the most.
Citigroup, whose stock just can't seem to find a bottom, seems to have been the worst of the bunch. In an interesting twist, much of the pessimism over the company's quarter came because Citigroup only wrote down some $18 billion and didn't propose as many job cuts as the market was hoping.
CAPS still rates Citigroup just two stars out of five, but there has been some bullish sentiment after the company's earnings release. Michaelkoh1 rated Citi's stock an outperformer and noted that "2007 will be tough, and there will likely be more pain for equity investors as the financials muddle through this year, but this is a strong diversified franchise and will outperform the market over the next 2 to 4 years."
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Posted
Jan 01 2008, 02:39 PM
by
Douglas McIntyre
Rating:
It is not unusual for stocks to lose half of their value in a year. Certainly a number of financial shares like Countrywide and MBIA did it over the last few months. And other firms which have lost market share, as AMD did in the chip business, have taken very big tumbles since the beginning of 2007. All three of these companies could fall further if they do not begin to post better financial results.
These companies are part of a list of ten stocks which could fall by half in 2008. This list includes companies whose stocks were inflated because they are in hot markets like China. That puts Baidu and LDK Solar into the category of shares which could fall if the big Asian economy slows.
Some of the other shares that may fall are from companies in badly damaged industries like autos and newspapers. That includes Ford and Journal Register. The 24/7 Wall St. in-depth look at those companies is available in a longer article. The list contains an IPO from 2007, VMWare. It is in an attractive sector of the software market, but competition is heating up from companies including Microsoft, and the value of the company may have gotten ahead of itself.
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Posted
Nov 05 2007, 10:33 AM
by
Matt Koppenheffer
Rating:
There's a sidebar on the Wall Street Journal website right now with the title "perform or die" and pictures of Chuck Prince and Stan O'Neal -- now, respectively, the former CEOs of Citigroup and Merrill Lynch. By "die," of course, the WSJ means to be fired, as both have very recently found themselves jobless, but still very much alive. While the headline is certainly an eye catcher, is it true? One might argue that no matter where you're the head honcho, if you don't perform you may quickly find yourself back on HotJobs. The case is a bit different for Prince and O'Neal though. The banks of both CEOs racked up massive losses and write-downs from the mortgage and credit markets under their watch. In the case of O'Neal, it was $8.4 billion in write-downs in the third quarter capped off by furtive talks with Wachovia about a merger that cost him his job. More recently for Prince, it was Citigroup's underperformance versus its competitors over the preceding years, combined $6.5 billion of write-downs in the third quarter and an expected $8 billion to $11 billion of further write-downs in the fourth quarter that spelled the end.
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Posted
Oct 16 2007, 10:57 AM
by
Matt Koppenheffer
Rating:
When it comes to evaluating companies as investments, analyzing management can be both one of the most important and most difficult undertakings. One way an investor can measure the quality of management is to look at what management says versus what management does.
This is likely what many investors are running through when it comes to Citigroup's CEO Chuck Prince. Despite his stated plans for the bank, Chuck can't seem to make things happen. And to that point, Deutsche Bank's Mike Mayo took him to task on Citi's conference call.
Quoth Mayo: "Well, one of your main targets for this year was to grow revenues faster than expenses and that is not going to pan out. This could be the third year in a row where that doesn't pan out. That was clearly a very important factor."
In other words, "what exactly are you doing Chuck?"
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