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We recently gave a list of companies which we thought Warren Buffett might want to consider selling or lightening up on after Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (NYSE: BRK-A) disclosed that it had finally decided to lighten up on its giant stake in Moody’s Corp. (NYSE: MCO). But an interesting question was brought up as a result of this. Whether Buffett decides to unload stocks or not…. Which Buffett holdings have actually managed to bounce the most from their lows? With today being month-end, we wanted to run some numbers here. We already noted yesterday that if and when we see a 1,000 close on the S&P 500 Index it marks a 50% gain from the market lows in March. There has been a huge bounce in his banking stocks, with Bank of America Corp. (NYSE: BAC) bouncing some 466% from the lows and a 214% bounce in Wells Fargo & Company (NYSE: WFC).
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Monthly Archives: July 2009
Which Buffett & Berkshire Hathaway Stocks Bounced The Most? (BRK-A, BAC, WFC, KMX, GE, GCI, IR, USG)
Government Bails Itself Out At GM: Cash For Clunkers Gets $2 Billion
The $1 billion “Cash for Clunkers” program was an ideal way for the government to protect its $50 billion investment in GM by stimulating domestic car sales as the industry enters the critical new model season.
The trouble with the plan is that the fund exhausted itself in a few days. Pent up demand for new cars caused a flood of trade-ins.
Congress has passed another $2 billion in funding to be taken from the $787 stimulus package. The clunkers program should have helped July sales, and now it can boost activity in August. Car sales figures may look encouraging for the first time in over a year.
Douglas A. McIntyre
Microsoft Analyst Day: As The King Was Looking Down, Google Plays Jester
Microsoft Corp’s (Nasdaq: MSFT) Steve Ballmer inks a deal with Yahoo, the software giant’s biggest in years, and all of a sudden he’s invincible.
He sure made it sound that way at the company’s annual meeting with financial analysts this week, calling Apple’s (Nasdaq: AAPL) share gains versus Microsoft a “rounding error.” Read More
Is Carl Icahn Stealing XO? (XOHO, IEP)
XO Holdings, Inc. (OTCBB: XOHO) is not a usual company we’d cover because of the size and because of the Bulletin Board status. But this week we have been getting multiple inquiries about this stock. Usually on OTC stocks about all we see are stocks being touted, but that is not the case here. Carl Icahn is involved in this company as majority holder, and he’s trying to buy the rest of the company that he does not own for $0.55 per share. This is the old XO Communications, the competitive local exchange carrier or CLEC, although that term slowly disappeared over the last decade.
Icahn is of course the Chairman of Icahn Enterprises, L.P. (NYSE: IEP) and has been influential in many mergers. This time he is the buyer rather than a holder trying to command a higher price. It might have been easy for the world to forget about XO, but the company has held its ground in an almost forgotten sub-sector of the telecom sector. After taking a look through the books, it turns out that its business is still generating more than $1.4 billion in annual revenue. But that is not profitable for common holders.
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A Buy and Sell Case For Motorola (MOT)
Motorola Inc. (NYSE: MOT) has been a troubled handset and communications and networking equipment provider for what is becoming longer than memory cares to record. Its restructuring plans have never seemed to end in more than a decade. We now have earnings behind us, and now come the analyst calls. Where this gets interesting this morning is that we have two opposite calls. Effectively, there is an upgrade to a BUY, and there is a downgrade to SELL.
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Top Day Trader Alerts (ARIA, ANDS, SYNA, NVTL, ABAX, FSLR, ESLR, AVII)
The following are some of the top stocks to watch for active trading today based on pre-market and after-hours volume activity. There are links through to more detailed coverage and volume analysis at VSInvestor.com:
Ariad Pharmaceuticals Inc. (Nasdaq: ARIA) shares are down this morning on cash crunch worries, following concerns raised by BioHealthInvestor.com earlier this week of just such a scenario.
Anadys Pharmaceuticals Inc (Nasdaq: ANDS) are up 50 percent in the premarket after getting a key FDA clearance.
Solar stocks are looking dimmer. First Solar Inc. (Nasdaq: FSLR) is down sharply on increased receivables, and negative conference call comments about pricing and debt financing. Evergreen Solar Inc. (Nasdaq: ESLR) shares are sinking on a wider loss, lower margins and similar pricing concerns
Synaptics Inc. (Nasdaq: SYNA) shares are getting hammered on concerns about PC revenue and a CEO transition.
Novatel Wireless Inc. (Nasdaq: NVTL) shares are surging on raised Q3 guidance.
Abaxis Inc. (Nasdaq: ABAX) shares are up strongly after earnings, and a strong diagnostic reagent disc sales increase.
AVI BioPharma Inc. (Nasdaq: AVII) shares are down 9 percent in early trade, after the company filed a shelf registration.
-The 24/7 Wall St. Team
Q2 GDP Masks The Real Woes
We already knew GDP was coming out and that it was going to be bad. At least it was not an echo of the -5.5% GDP drop seen in Q1. The preliminary GDP came in at only -1.0% for the preliminary Q2 data. We had penciled in roughly -1.5% as the estimate. Unfortunately, it is the details that are not very attractive if you start to back some data out.
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Top 10 Analyst Upgrades and Downgrades (ARIA, RATE, IRM, ISLN, MOT, OMX, RTP, SYNA, VSEA, DIS)
These are ten of the top pre-market analyst calls with upgrads and downgrades that we have seen from Wall Street early this Friday morning:
Ariad pharmaceuticals (ARIA) Cut to Sell at Merriman Curhan Ford.
Bankrate (RATE) Cut to Hold at Jefferies.
Iron Mountain (IRM) Cut to Neutral at Baird.
Isilon Systems (ISLN) Raised to Buy at ThinkEquity; Raised to Buy at Needham.
Motorola (MOT) Raised to Outperform at Morgan Keegan.
OfficeMax (OMX) Raised to Buy at Citigroup.
Rio Tinto (RTP) Cut to Neutral at Credit Suisse.
Synaptics (SYNA) Cut to Hold at Jefferies.
Varian Semiconductor (VSEA) Raised to Buy at UBS.
Walt Disney (DIS) Cut to Underweight at JPMorgan.
Jon C. Ogg
July 31, 2009
What If Swine Flu Cases Have Peaked?
It is an audacious statement, but Sir Liam Donaldson, Chief Medical Officer of the UK, believes that swine flu cases may have peaked at about 110,000. He sees evidence that the number of people contracting the disease has leveled off. He admits that the flu may be back in the fall, but he does not insist that it will be. Read More
Deflation Emerges With Force
The Fed has stated that it is not worried that low interest rates and an economic recovery will cause inflation. Adjustments in economic policy and control of the money supply will prevent that. Deflation is another matter.
Japanese consumer prices dropped 1.7% in June. Reuters claims that this is a record level of deflation in the large Asian economy. Today, EU officials announced that consumer prices in that region fell .6% during last month. Read More
“Christmas In July” May Kill Retail Jobs In The Fall
The Wall Street Journal reports that a number of retailers are running “Christmas In July” sales. They may help store chains that are low on money, but they probably just displace sales that would normally have taken place in October. That may be good for retail balance sheets, but only for a brief period.
Consumers are so badly shaken by unemployment, flat wages, and credit problems that they are not likely to spend a lot of money in malls now and then come back and spend a great deal more money in the fall. Read More
“Cash For Clunkers” An Artificial Program Shields Auto Industry
Ford (F) makes better cars than it did last year, or at least there is better demand for them. The “cash for clunkers” program put together by the US government helped sell cars, a fact that Ford admitted.
The “clunkers” stimulus which allowed consumers to trade in old, fuel-inefficient cars for new fuel-efficient ones, lasted about a week. The government withdrew the package, either because it ran through its $1 billion of funding or because it was too complex for dealers to manage. Media accounts cite both reasons. Read More
The Government’s Fight To Make Rich Bankers Poor
Andrew Cuomo, who is running for governor of New York State without having announced it, is denouncing Wall St. because of its big pay packages while in his current role as state attorney general. His office recently released a report that showed that nearly 5,000 employees at the nation’s nine largest banks made more than $1 million last year. This concerns Cuomo, of course, because Wall St. was in the process of losing hundreds of billions of dollars and taking sums that were nearly as large from the federal TARP program while at the same time distributing rich compensation packages. Read More
24/7 Wall St. TV: Sony–No Hit Products Since The Stone Age
Sony has been skewered for its lack of innovation for the last half decade. Its last big consumer electronics hit was the Walkman which went on sale in June 1979. Sony had another hit in 2000 when it launched the PlayStation 2 which has sold over 140 million units, but game consoles are not a mainstream electronics business, no matter how profitable they are. Video games don’t sell across the broad spectrum of consumers the way that PCs, TVs, and handsets do. Read More
Media Digest 7/31/2009 Reuters, WSJ, NYTimes, FT, Bloomberg
Reuters: Banks paid out billions of dollars in bonuses last year while losing money.
Reuters: The US closed its car “clunkers” program just as it began as funds ran out.
Reuters: Obame faces more questions about his health care plan.
Reuters: A Congressional bill would affect OTC derivative holdings. Read More
Asia Markets And Europe Open 7/31/2009
Markets in Asia were mostly higher.
The Nikkei rose 1.9% to 10,367. Sony (SNE) moved up on earnings.
The Hang Seng rose 1.6% to 20,551.
The Shanghai Composite was up 2.7% to 3,412.
At the open in Europe, the FTSE fell .3% to 4,517. The Dax rose .1% to 5,363, and the CAC 40 dropped .1% to 3,431.
Data from Reuters and MarketWatch.
Douglas A. McIntyre
Wynn vs. Las Vegas Sands, A Tale of Two Casinos (WYNN, LVS)
Today we had earnings from casino rivals Wynn Resorts Ltd. (NASDAQ: WYNN) and Las Vegas Sands Corp. (NYSE: LVS). While many consider these companies very similar for having higher-end operations and Macau operations or ambitions, these two earnings reports and the reactions are rather different.
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Rosetta Stone Proves Its Worth (RST)
Rosetta Stone, Inc. (NYSE: RST) just gave us its first earnings report that had a full quarter’s worth public data in it. The language learning software solution provider did not disappoint. In fact, this is a solid report.
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First Solar Kills Estimates, But Mute on Guidance (FSLR, TAN)
First Solar, Inc. (Nasdaq: FSLR) has just given its earnings report. The solar leader in the U.S. reported its revenues were $525.9 million. While this is up from $418.2 million in the first quarter of 2009 and up from $267.0 million in the quarter a year ago, this is a substantial win over the $459.12 million estimates from Thomson Reuters.
Net income for the second quarter came to $180.6 million, or $2.11 EPS. This is above the $1.99 EPS a quarter ago and well above the $0.85 a year ago, but the Thomson Reuters estimate was a mere $1.62 EPS per share on a fully diluted basis for the second quarter of fiscal 2008.
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Nortel’s Existence Extended (NRTLQ)
Nortel Networks Corporation (OTCBB: NRTLQ) is still alive. Sort of. The bankrupt telecom and communications networking equipment provider has announced that the company, its Nortel Networks Limited, and the other Canadian subsidiaries that filed for creditor protection under the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act, have all obtained an order from the Ontario Superior Court of Justice a stay of proceedings that was previously granted by the Canadian Court.
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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% 
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