So far there is a small underwriting group. Joint book-running managers have been listed as Citigroup and Jefferies. No co-managers have yet been listed, but that also may change prior to the IPO.

Do you remember when Warren Buffett said he wished he had a vehicle to buy a million homes, administer and rent them, and then sell them? Waypoint Homes Realty Trust is a recently formed Maryland corporation that focuses on the acquisition, renovation, leasing, maintenance and management of single-family homes. Its initial target markets are shown to be San Francisco and the Bay Area, Sacramento, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Phoenix, parts of Florida and elsewhere.

The company states that its principal objective is to generate attractive risk-adjusted returns for its stockholders over the long-term through capital appreciation and dividend growth. It said, “We generate revenue by leasing our portfolio of single-family homes and, from this revenue, expect to pay the operating costs associated with our business and any distributions to our stockholders.”

FULL IPO FILING

Representing a $250 billion market for American companies today, according to the U.S.-China Business Council estimates the country, it’s worth noting the American companies that can take advantage of the enormous opportunity. Some of the nation’s biggest brands have already managed to be the Chinese market leaders in their particular segments. Apple sells more tablets than any competitor in China and Gillette more razors than any other brand. While some of these companies are facing increased competition internationally and from China-based firms, others appear to be pulling away from the pack. 

Click here to see the most popular brands in China

Because China is not an open market, international companies cannot compete in some sectors. According to the U.S.-China Business Council, the Chinese government currently imposes restrictions on about 100 different sectors in both manufacturing and service industries, including much of the agriculture and food production, cloud computing, financial services, petrochemicals, and health insurance, among others.

In the sectors that remain more open to international competition, China represents an opportunity for companies to strengthen their brand and also move ahead of their closest competitors globally. One example of a company capitalizing on its leading position in China is Yum! Brands. The fast food company is behind global competitors like McDonald’s, which had roughly double Yum’s worldwide sales in 2012. Nevertheless, Yum! currently has a very strong foothold in China. Its leading chain, KFC, has more than 4,200 stores in the country, more than double that of McDonald’s, its closest competitor. What’s more, the company, despite setbacks, is growing its presence significantly there.

No doubt, the companies that entered the Chinese market planned their entry carefully. But it’s also clear that many managed to capitalize on their domestic and international brand dominance outside of China. Companies such as Starbucks, Apple, Nike, and Coca-Cola have thrived in the country — just as they do all over the world. Whether the companies can continue to leverage that value against up-and-coming Chinese brands remains to be seen.

These are the most popular American brands in China.

Placed Insights, a consumer habits data service provider, monitors the consumption behavior of more than 70,000 Americans ages 14 and older on a monthly basis. The data show that a handful of companies are visited by at more than one in 10 Americans each month. The companies are primarily in the fast food, discount retail and pharmacy sectors. Based on a review of Placed’s data for March 2013, these are the most visited stores in America.

Click here to see the ten most popular stores

The type of businesses these companies are in plays a big part in the kind of foot traffic they get each month. According to Placed Insights, less than 40% of Americans visited a bank or clothing fashion store in March. At the same time, an estimated 60% visited a department store, and more than two-thirds went to a fast food restaurant at least once.

Placed Insights founder and CEO David Shim explained that the type of goods being sold at a business is the difference between Americans going once a year, or once a week. “People go to fast food at a high frequency. They don’t necessarily go shopping for a sweater every day, but they eat food every day.”

It should come as no surprise that most of these companies have made concerted effort to expand their products, with varying degrees of success. Walmart, for example, has expanded its business to offer groceries, and even has fast food restaurants in the store. Starbucks has expanded its menu options to include breakfast sandwiches and other meals. McDonald’s new McCafe coffee brand has been very successful. These are all new services devised to make more money on existing customers, bring in a new set of customers, and to bring them in more often.

While the type of goods and services being offered by these companies is critical, the other is their dominant national presence. These companies have thousands of locations all over the country. Rare is the American town without a McDonald’s, Burger King, Taco Bell, Subway, or some combination of the three. McDonald’s had more than 14,000 locations in the U.S. in 2012, while Subway had more than 25,000 stores.

Using figures recently published by Placed Insights, 24/7 Wall St. compiled a list of the most visited stores in America. To assess how profitable and popular these stores were, we also consulted companies’ financial statements. Same-store sales growth, systemwide sales, and other measures of store performance were provided by research firms RetailSails and Technomic. Stock prices are for the parent company that owns the store.

These are America’s most popular stores.

Click here to see the companies that owe employees a raise

Several of the American most successful companies have large numbers of low-paid employees. These people work in retail stores, call centers, or clean hotel rooms. Some do not make a great deal more than the minimum wage. However, their work is critical to the daily success of their companies. Despite their modest pay, they are often the face of their corporations. The senior management at companies like McDonald’s and AT&T do not deal with customers — the clerks and restaurant staffs do.

Not all the divisions of these companies pay their employees poorly. Many of the people who work at Walt Disney’s theme parks have modest salaries. However, employees at the company’s ESPN and movie studio divisions generally do better. Comcast’s account executives who sell cable subscriptions do not make a great deal of money. Nevertheless, people who work at some parts of the company’s NBC division are paid handsomely.

Does a public company have an obligation to reward all of its employees if its earnings are particularly strong? No. But there is a strong case to be made that these workers deserve higher compensation when earnings improvements are so extraordinary that they give shareholders and management great returns.

Based on data provided by Capital IQ of S&P 500 companies, 24/7 Wall St. determined which corporations had high net income, high net profit margins, and major one-year growth in net income. In order to be considered, companies had to be in a customer-facing indusry, and have a large number of low-wage workers. We excluded banks because the data we used to measure profitability is inadequate for judging the industry’s performance. Employment data by company are from Yahoo! Finance. CEO pay is from filings submitted by public companies with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Figures on compensation are from Glassdoor.com and are self-reported by users to the website.

These are the companies that owe employees a raise.

Ambac issued a press release showing that the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York has approved a settlement with the United States that brings resolution to claims filed by the Internal Revenue Service and related litigation. Another approval from the Bankruptcy Court is that Ambac will enter into an amendment to the existing tax sharing agreement with Ambac Assurance Corporation as well as certain modifications to Ambac’s Fifth Amended Plan of Reorganization.

The company said, “Ambac is scheduled to execute a closing agreement with the IRS on April 30, 2013, concurrent with its payment of $1.9 million, and the Segregated Account of Ambac Assurance Corporation’s payment of $100 million, to the United States… Ambac expects to fulfill the remaining conditions to the effectiveness of the Plan on or before May 1, 2013.”

The reorganization will be as follows:

• Ambac will distribute 45,000,000 new common shares and 5,047,138 new warrants to holders of allowed claims.
• All existing common stock (the ABKFQ) of the company will be cancelled on the effective date and the holders of such stock will not receive any distributions under the Plan.
• Ambac has received approval from the NASDAQ OMX Group to list its new common shares under the ticker “AMBC” and the new warrants under the ticker of “AMBCW.”

This would have seemed impossible to expect that Ambac would return and clear through bankruptcy court as recently as last year. Now it just seems hard to believe. Ambac will be returning (sorry, re-emerging) as a public stock again.

The environmental push over the past four decades hasn’t skipped big business, which have contributed to concrete advances in new forms of energy, among them wind and solar. Companies have also introduced many new products that run on advanced engine power — power that gives off few if any emissions, especially compared to older, related products that run on fossil fuels.

Click here to see the 10 best green cars

Near the top of the list of products that are using energy more efficiently or using alternative energy are cars. While motor vehicle sales are an important part of the economy, their engines have long contributed to air pollution. Close to 15 million cars and light trucks will be sold this year alone in the U.S. And still the great majority of these continue to be powered by gasoline.

The reasons that people are interested in “green cars” go beyond environmental advantages. Gas prices have been as high as $4 in the last two years. Recently, the price of a gallon of regular gasoline was still above $3.50 nationwide. Despite many improvements in efficiency, gas cars, in many cases, get no better than 25 or 30 MPG. Large pickups and eight-cylinder cars get much worse than that. However, new all-electric engine cars get nearly as high as the equivalent of 100 MPG. That means fuel cost savings savings of hundreds of dollars a year in contrast to an all-gas car.

There have been a number of versions of green cars. The Toyota Prius, the most successful gas-electric hybrid, went on sale in 1997. It was the earliest version of a line of cars that would eventually push Toyota’s all-time hybrid sales above 5 million. Hybrids were a step toward the elimination of cars running exclusively on fossil fuels. The current Prius gets 50 MPG.

The big breakthrough in mileage came with the electric engines and plug-ins. An example is the Prius Plug-In, which gets the equivalent of an estimated 95 MPG in electric mode.

In preparation for Earth Day, research firm Kelley Blue Book put together a list of the Ten Best Green Cars of 2013. Some of these, like the Nissan Leaf, are well known. One is exotic — the Tesla Model S — a hyperfast, sports car. Others are hybrid engine versions of existing model lines like the Toyota Avalon Hybrid. The KBB list is a combination of all-electric and traditional hybrid cars.

On completion of the testing, Jack R. Nerad, executive editorial director and executive market analyst for Kelley Blue Book’s KBB.com, said, “A growing number of eco-conscious drivers are going ‘Green’ when it comes to the new car they choose to drive, and auto manufacturers have primed the pump with the widest array of offerings in the ‘Green Car’ segment than ever before. After driving and testing nearly every new vehicle on the market today, our editors compiled a 10 Best Green Cars list that provides a roadmap for consumers looking to get more miles from each gallon of gasoline or to eliminate gasoline altogether.”

24/7 Wall St. reviewed Kelley Blue Book’s list of the 10 best green cars, which takes into consideration fuel efficiency, value, and quality of hybrid, electric, and plug-in hybrid vehicles. For these 10 cars, we reviewed additional data provided by KBB.com, which included fuel efficiency and 2011 and 2012 sales, we looked at manufacturer’s suggested retail price for the base models, as well as for comparable non-hybrid or electric versions of these models. We also used publicly available data from the Environmental Protection Agency for those fuel efficiency and driving range figures not supplied by Kelley Blue Book. We also considered reviews of these models from groups such as auto data site Edmunds.com.

States may tax their population heavily, but also can be liberal about personal choices, like regulation on drugs, alcohol, tobacco and marriage equality. Based on the “Freedom in the 50 States” report, published by the George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, a libertarian-leaning think tank, 24/7 Wall St. reviewed the states with least freedom.

Click here to see the least free states

The report breaks freedom into three distinct categories: personal freedom, fiscal freedom and regulatory freedom. According to the Mercatus Center, a free state has a government that is more socially liberal, has hands-off policies, spends less and levies less taxes on its residents.

While some states do better than others based on the Mercatus report, the states with the best overall scores for freedom are not necessarily protecting liberty across the board. While the top 10 states tend to score well in regulatory and fiscal policy, only two are in the top 10 for personal freedom. South Dakota, which has the second-highest overall freedom score, is the fifth worst in the country for personal freedom, which includes victimless crimes like drugs and prostitution, as well as religious freedom.

While the states with the worst overall freedom tend to score poorly across the board, there are also states that do well in some areas. Maine is eighth worst for fiscal freedom because of its high tax burden and government employment. However, it is also third best in the country for personal freedom, in part because of its marriage equality, education and drug enforcement laws.

Mercatus scholar and assistant professor of political science at University of New York at Buffalo, Jason Sorens, explained that this has a great deal to do with the political divide in this country. Sorens noted that left-leaning states tend to perform better in areas like marriage freedom, marijuana, victimless crimes, gambling and alcohol. These states also are likely to be tax-and-spend economies, with high expenditure on education, Medicaid and pensions, and higher tax burdens to pay for these costs.

At the same time, conservative states, which perform poorly in those areas in personal freedom, do well in gun freedom, education and tobacco laws. They also tend to operate more fiscally conservative, spending less on benefits and taxing less. “There aren’t any states that do really well across the board, that really break out of the left-right mold,” Sorens said.

One factor that has helped some of these states’ scores, particularly in the past few years, has been their ability to make it through the recession, Sorens explained. “Those states that have seen the biggest increases in their freedom score — North Dakota, Oklahoma and Idaho — usually it is low taxation that is driving these improvements.” Those states fared much better than most of the country during the recession.

To determine the least-free states in America, 24/7 Wall St. reviewed “Freedom in the 50 States,” published by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, a market-oriented university-based research center. The current publication provides information that is current for 2011. Current unemployment figures for February from the Bureau of Labor Statistics were also analyzed.

Data from a variety of public and private sources show that most of the factors for a strong housing recovery are in place. Foreclosures have started to fall. Home prices have risen year over year in many large markets. Most home builders have become more optimistic. Raw home sales numbers are higher. And the worst-hit markets in terms of sale prices are among those that have recovered best, which means many underwater mortgages are underwater no longer.

Doubts about the sustainability of the recovery are founded on the trends of people who want to rent residences rather than buy them, a shaky recovery of employment and gross domestic product, as well as the belief that home inventories will balloon sharply as more houses are put on the market as prices recover and people can make a profit. That inventory increase eventually will put prices back into a downward spiral, this theory says.

However, the factor that may tip home sales and prices higher is the simple desire of Americans to own their own homes. Based on new Gallup data on home ownership in the United States:

Americans’ dream of owning a home is alive and well, evidenced by the fact that most Americans own a home and plan to continue to do so (56%), or don’t own a home but plan on buying one in the next 10 years (25%).

And:

Nearly 7 in 10 Americans aged 18 to 29 currently do not own a home, but plan on buying one within the next 10 years. Coupling this with the 21% of younger Americans who say they already are homeowners leaves few adults under 30 who say they don’t own a home and have no plans on buying one.

Spread across the number of individuals in each of the Gallup categories, tens of millions of people own or want to own homes. And the trend apparently will last for years.

Often there is a barely hidden source of demand that makes a part of the economy more successful than forecast. The auto industry is an example, in fact. Unit sales over the past two years have been higher than most experts expected. But people were drawn by low interest rates, and the fact that the cars they have owned are, on average, many years older than in the past. A portion of the recovery is, therefore, based on replacement. Beyond that, many Americans may just want to own a new car.

Housing’s future could be better than expected because of a long-term desire of Americans to have their own homes.

Methodology: Results for this Gallup poll are based on telephone interviews conducted April 4 to 14, 2013, with a random sample of 2,017 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia.

The company’s summary was $0.84 EPS and $1.34 billion in revenue versus Thomson Reuters estimates of $0.77 EPS and $1.3 billion in revenue.

We would note that BofA/Merrill Lynch said that SanDisk was going to beat earnings handily and that it sees upside to its $66 price target. It is worth noting that solid-state drive (SSD) products drove 20% of sales in the quarter and SanDisk expects gains in 2013. Cash flow from operations totaled $474 million and its cash and cash-equivalents totaled $6.19 billion in the last quarter.

Be advised that SanDisk did not offer guidance ahead. Without guidance, you should consider this to be unfinished business. SanDisk was down 3% to $55.72 in regular trading and the stock is down close to 5% more while waiting for guidance.