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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
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
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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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Posted
Nov 02 2007, 02:06 AM
by
Jon Markman
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Even though this site is published by Microsoft, there's no reason we can't mention its stellar earnings report last week. I've been urging subscribers to my Strategic Advantage newsletter service to buy the stock since June in anticipation of a strong third and fourth quarter, and we have not been disappointed as fundamentals have improved dramatically and shares are up 25%.
The key point: Mainstream investors of all stripes simply underestimated the impact of the new Xbox game Halo 3, rising PC sales in developing nations and the slow but steady purchase of the new Windows Vista operating system. Results were actually staggering, especially for an iconic firm which until recently seemed asleep at the wheel. Revenue soared 27% to nearly $14 billion, beating the consensus estimate by more than $1 billion. Earnings roared 23% higher, to $4.3 billion or 45 cents per share. For a company of this size, putting up growth in the 20%-plus range is no easy feat.
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Posted
Oct 31 2007, 10:17 AM
by
Jon Markman
Rating:
Any doubts about the idea that Apple could produce another blow-out quarter this winter were put to rest this weekend when the company released its latest operating system, called Leopard. The company reports that it sold a staggering 2 million copies through its retail stores, resellers and online from Friday through Monday.
Just to give you some perspective on that number: When Apple released its Jaguar operating system in 2002, it sold 100,000 in the first weekend. Two years ago, when it released the Tiger operating system, it took seven weeks to sell 2 million copies. So 2 million in three days has to blow you away. Regardless of the credit crunch, foreclosure crisis and rumors of consumer spending slowdown, Apple stores were packed this weekend.
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