Pacific Sunwear (PSUN) Awful forecast. Drops to $5 from 52-week high of $18.44.
Cost Plus (CPWM) Tough results for last quarter. Sells down to $1.50 from 52-week high of $6.22.
China Techfaith (CNTF) Company warns on sales, cut jobs. Plunges to $1.51 from 52-week high of $9.98.
Exlservice Holdings (EXLS) No big news. Slips to $11.07 from 52-week high of $28.96.
Douglas A. McIntyre
Alpharma, Inc. (NYSE: ALO) has already responded to King Pharmaceuticals Inc. (NYSE: KG) regarding the $33.00 per share offer made by King to acquire Alpharma. As we noted based upon the premium trading to the buyout, it was obvious that many were hoping for a higher buyout price.
Several reports indicate that GM (GM, Ford (F), and Chrysler are approaching the government for a total of $25 billion in loans at interest rates as low as 4.5%. The money could come in the form of loan guarantees.
Perhaps Toyota (TM) could borrow some cash as well.
The move to get fresh capital at a low rate is being championed by powerful and aged US Congressman John Dingell, a man who never saw a piece of pork he did not like.
Moody’s has come out with a downgrade this morning on the preferred stock ratings of Fannie Mae (NYSE: FNM) and Freddie Mac (NYSE: FRE). The ratings have been taken down to Baa3 from A1 and the Bank Financial Strength Ratings to D+ from B-. The preferred stock ratings and BFSRs also both remain on review for possible further downgrade. There may be a little bit of a silver lining to this though. Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s Aaa senior long-term debt and Prime-1 short-term debt ratings were affirmed with stable outlooks.
Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke is giving a speech out at the K.C. Fed Symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming this morning. His released comments show that he is expecting the economic weakness to persist and that we aren’t in the clear. The good news is that he believes inflation may slow down ahead.
According to the Pacific Sunwear proxy, CEO Sally Frame Kasaks makes a base salary of $1,250,000. Last year, her total compensation was $3.2 million.
Based on the performance of the stock and the business, those numbers are extraordinarily high. After posted flat revenue of $312 million for the last quarter, and operating income of only $3.7 million, Pacific Sunwear’s shares fell 31% today to just above $5.
This morning there was a rather long CNBC interview where Becky Quick got to interview Berkshire Hathaway’s (NYSE: BRK-A) Warren Buffett live in Omaha. He noted specifically that the economic weakness was going to go out into 2009 with a further slowing down in housing, retail, and credit. Buffett talked about many issues from economics to specific stocks to politics. The good news for equity traders is that Buffett said equities are a better value now. We covered the equities angle first and then went over some of his other comments after. These are paraphrased comments for the most part, but the specific stocks he covered with opinions below were Wells Fargo (NYSE: WFC) andAmerican Express (NYSE: AXP), Fannie Mae (NYSE: FNM) and Freddie Mac (NYSE: FRE), Anheuser-Busch (NYSE: BUD), and he commented on Canadian oil sands after his visit to Canadian Natural Resources Limited(NYSE: CNQ) and railroad Burlington Northern (NYSE: BNI).
These are some of the top analyst calls we are seeing in pre-market trading this Friday morning:
Jon C. Ogg
August 22, 2008
It is fairly thin in analyst coverage today, but these are some of the Friday morning analyst calls we are seeing before the open:
Jon C. Ogg
August 22, 2008
The AP announced its list of the top 10 paid CEOs for 2007. The figures were based on "AP’s compensation formula, which adds up salary, perks, bonuses, above-market interest on pay set aside for later, and company estimates for the value of stock options and stock awards on the day they were granted last year."
While these figures are for last year, a number of the companies on the list have had remarkably poor stock market returns over the last two years, making the pay packages unseemly.
Citigroup (C) cut is earnings estimates for Goldman Sachs (GS), Morgan Stanley (MS), and Lehman (LEH). Today, Bank of America (BAC) cuts its earnings targets for Goldman and Morgan Stanley. Sanford Bernstein and Oppenheimer have slashed most of their earnings predictions for banks and brokerages.
The contest to see how fast analysts can reset their expectations for the financial industry becomes more muddled every day.
It looks like Google (GOOG) will strike a deal to be the default search feature on all of Verizon’s (VZ) cellular handsets. Since the phone company has about 70 million subscribers, the win is significant. It cuts Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo! (YHOO) out of a potentially valuable piece of real estate.
The collapse in the shares of Freddie Mac (FRE) and Fannie Mae (FNM) was arrested yesterday. At one point, both stocks were up and Fannie Mae ended the day in the plus column. It has begin to occur to the market that the managements of the two companies are not lying. The firms might just be viable without a significant bail-out. Their share price action shows that at least someone is buying the story.
Boeing (BA) was able to get the government to re-open the bidding for the Air Force’s new tanker. In the original round of competition, Boeing was bested by the team of Northrup Grumman (NOC) and EADS. Some members of Congress thought it was un-American for a European company to get part of the deal, but the low bidder did seem to be the winner.
Now that Boeing is getting a new chance, the firm says it needs six months to re-submit the details of its offer to build the plane. The Defense Department wanted the bids in by October 1.
According to Reuters, 
Warren Buffett and the head of Blackstone (BX) called for a solution to the govenment’s growing debt load and reliance of foreign investors to finance US borrowing.
Reuters reports that Korean banks held talks with Lehman (LEH) about taking a stake in the US broker.
Reuters writes that Boeing (BA) is thinking of planning a protest for the way the bidding for a big tanker contest is being managed.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng was closed.
The Nikkei fell .7% to 20,392. All Nippon Airways was up .3% to 295. Casio was down 3.7% to 1229.
The Shanghai Composite fell 1.1% to 2,405.
Data from Reuters.
Douglas A. McIntyre
| Today’s top tickerspy Indexes | |
| Home Furnishing R... | +14.1% |
| Ethanol and Biofu... | +5.1% |
| Electronics Retai... | +2.1% |
| Diabetes Stocks | +2.0% |
| Memory Chip Stock... | +2.0% |
 | |
| |
RSS Updates
Email Updates
