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Posted
Aug 22 2008, 01:37 AM
by
Charley Blaine
Rating:
Here's something the top management of Yahoo may wish nobody noticed.
The stock is now lower than its $19.18 close on Jan. 31, the day before Microsoft launched its $33-a-share, $44.6 billion offer for the Internet company. (Microsoft is the publisher of MSN Money.)
Yahoo closed Thursday at $19.11. On Wednesday, it closed at $19.17.
While Yahoo can say it fought off Microsoft and a potential proxy fight from activist Carl Icahn, the victory has been costly. And not just because the company spent $36 million waging the fight
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Posted
Apr 17 2008, 11:32 PM
by
Charley Blaine
Rating:
Hell hath no fury like investors who believed a data source that turned out to be wrong.
Just ask comScore, the Internet trafffic tracking company that suggested that growth in Google's domestic paid clicks were slowing. Lots of investors interpreted that to mean that Google's profit growth would slow (unless Google was collecting more money for each click). And that was one reason why, over the past eight weeks or so, Google's stock struggled.
Well, after Thursday's market close, Google said that its profits soared in the first quarter, and the stock jumped 17% to $525.96 in after-hours trading. And it appears that the Internet search giant was, in fact, getting more money for each click
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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
Feb 29 2008, 03:22 PM
by
Charley Blaine
Rating:
How bad have the first two months of 2008 been? Bad. January and February were the worst-ever opening two months for the Standard & Poor's 500 Index and the Nasdaq Composite Index. The Dow Jones Industrial Average wasn't much better.
The advice investors should take away from the numbers: Be patient for a bottom. Be very patient. The odds that the market will recover completely by year-end aren't great, if only because it will take a long time to solve all the problems facing the banking system and the credit markets.
(For some perspective, check Barry Ritholtz's blog The Big Picture. Barry also likes to toss in fun cartoons and thoughts about everything from digital cameras to rock music. Also, check Floyd Norris' blog at the New York Times site.)
The Dow finished the first two months of the year down 7.5%. Since 1928, that's the blue-chip index's 6th-worst opening two months. The worst was 1933, when the index fell 14.3%. The next worst was 2000, when the Dow fell a combined 11.9%.
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Posted
Feb 21 2008, 06:41 PM
by
Charley Blaine
Rating:
So, you're wondering, when is the stock market going to take off again? Didn't the market bottom in January and won't it just start up another bull run?
Maybe, but the charts are telling me something different. What they tell me is that the Standard & Poor's 500 is settling into a trading range of 1,300 to 1,365. The Dow and the Nasdaq charts offer similar hints. And that would actually be good news because it would imply a bottom is starting to form to the sell-off since October. For another look at the data, check out the Bonddad blog's analysis.
You'd better hope the market trades sideways for a while.
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Posted
Feb 11 2008, 08:30 PM
by
Charley Blaine
Rating:
Chances are you haven't heard of Gordon Crawford, but my guess is that both Microsoft and Yahoo are paying close attention to whatever he thinks of Microsoft's $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo. (Microsoft is the publisher of MSN Money)
Crawford is a senior vice president at Capital Research and Management, the nation's largest mutual fund company. For years, he has been one of the world's top players in media investing. He helped Ted Turner sell Turner Broadcasting to Time Warner. Turner and Crawford are still pals; they share a passion for fly fishing.
And Crawford was one of the people who engineered Steve Case's departure from the board of Time Warner, back in those unhappy days when the media giant was AOL-Time Warner.
More important for our discussion: Capital Research is Yahoo's largest shareholder with 11.6% of the outstanding shares -- nearly twice as many as Yahoo co-founder David Filo. Capital Research boosted its position in Yahoo by 49.4% in the third quarter and, according to The Wall Street Journal, increased its stake in the fourth quarter.
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Posted
Dec 17 2007, 04:00 PM
by
Charley Blaine
Rating:
With today's 61-point loss to 2,574.46, the Nasdaq Composite Index is back at a drop of 10% from a recent high.
Technically, that means the index is in a correction. What it really means is that the recovery off lows reached on Nov. 26 is basically done.
The Nasdaq has had two corrections this year alone. The first was from mid-July until the middle of the day on Aug. 16, when the market abruptly -- and violently -- turned higher.
The second started after the index hit a 6-year high of 2,859.12 on Oct. 31. It dropped to a low of 2,540.99 on Nov. 26, rebounded back to 2,652 and fell back again.
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Posted
Dec 05 2007, 03:45 PM
by
Charley Blaine
Rating:
It looks to me like the hot money has started to flee crude oil. And the winners from that retreat look like Apple and Google.
Crude peaked on Nov. 21 at an intraday high of $99.29 a barrel -- a day that saw the Dow Jones industrials fall 211 points. It dropped to $86.95 in electronic trading Wednesday night. (Check out this chart of crude oil.) And this despite OPEC's decision to hold its production quotas at current levels at a meeting in Abu Dhabi.
Tech stocks started to move almost as soon as crude peaked and have been among the strongest market sectors in the last few weeks.
Since Nov. 21, the U.S. Oil Fund, the exchange-traded fund that invests in crude oil, has fallen nearly 12%, while Apple is up 10%. Google is up nearly 6%. The Morgan Stanley High-Technology 35 Index is up nealry 5%.
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Posted
Nov 09 2007, 12:12 PM
by
Robert Walberg
I'm sure you've heard the phrase the best offense is a good defense, well given the offensive nature of the market over the past month -- the DJIA, S&P 500 and Nasdaq indices are down by 8.4%, 6.7% and 7.0%, respectively -- it might just be time to adopt a more defensive posture with your portfolio. How do we reduce risk, while maintaining exposure to the market? Simple, we lower our portfolio's beta.
As defined on the Investopedia web site, beta measures a stock's volatility in relation to the market. By definition, the market (the S&P 500) has a beta of 1.0, and individual stocks are ranked according to how much they deviate from the market. A stock that swings more than the market over time has a beta above 1.0. If a stock moves less than the market, the stock's beta is less than 1.0. When the market is racing to new highs, we want stocks with high betas that will outperform, but when the opposite is true -- as is the case now -- we want stocks that either move down slower than the overall market or, better yet, move in the opposite direction.
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Posted
Nov 06 2007, 04:53 AM
by
Jon Markman
Rating:
When you think about the surprising success of the Nasdaq 100 index this year, the first things that naturally come to mind are tech powerhouses like Google, Apple and Microsoft. But you’ve got a leave a little room for the love of biotech too, and my favorite name there is Gilead Sciences.
The immunology specialist has really proven immune to selling for most of its life in the public arena, as it is one of the most successful stocks of any type of the past 10 years, with 2,075% capital appreciation stemming from steadfast invention and marketing of biotech therapies.
Pushing shares to a new high in the past week, though, were positive vibes at the 58th Annual Meeting of the American Society for the Study of Liver Disease currently taking place in Boston. Just in case you couldn’t attend, or haven’t checked out the abstracts, let me be the first to inform you that folks got pretty excited about a previously little-known compound being tested by Gilead with the exotic name GS-9190. It's a polymerase inhibitor therapy for hepatitis C that suddenly shows a lot of promise.
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