Lihua International, Inc. (NASDAQ: LIWA) is a Chinese developer, designer, manufacturer, marketer and distributor of alternatives to pure copper superfine and magnet wire, as well as copper rod products.  It priced a secondary offering of 3,726,708 shares at $8.05 per share. This one is actually trading up 9% at $8.80 on 440,000 shares right before the open.  This is less than a year old and its 52-week range is $5.20 to $12.69. Average volume is only 369,000 shares and this was over $9.00 a week ago.

Pinnacle West Capital Corporation (NYSE: PNW) priced a public secondary offering of 6,000,000 shares of common stock at $38.00 per share via Barclays Capital, Credit Suisse, BofA Merrill Lynch, and Wells Fargo Securities.  Pinnacle is up 0.1% at $38.55 on already over 1 million shares before the open.  The 52-week range is $25.28 to $39.10.

Targa Resources Partners LP (NYSE: NGLS) priced a secondary public offering of 8,500,000 common units owned by Targa LP, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Targa Resources, Inc. at $27.50 per unit. The underwriters are Barclays Capital, BofA Merrill Lynch, Citi, UBS Investment Bank and Wells Fargo and they have a 30-day option to purchase up to 1,275,000 additional common units.  The Partnership will not receive any of the proceeds from this offering and the number of outstanding common units of the Partnership will remain unchanged. The units are down 3.5% at $27.43 right before the open and we have seen almost 1 million units traded.  The 52-week range is $9.00 to $28.87.

Then there are also two key shelf registrations.

Live Nation Entertainment, Inc. (NYSE: LYV) filed last night for the sale of up to 2,969,187 shares of common stock, with a listed value of close to $42.9 million.  This is for shares “issued or to be issued upon the exercise of certain outstanding equity awards held by current and former employees and directors of IAC/InterActiveCorp, HSN, Inc., Interval Leisure Group, Inc. and Tree.com, Inc. and certain former employees and a former director of Ticketmaster under the Amended and Restated Ticketmaster Entertainment, Inc. 2008 Stock and Annual Incentive Plan.”  SHares are largely unaffected as the stock is down only 0.8% at $15.47 on less than 30,000 shares before the open.

Virtus Investment Partners, Inc. (NASDAQ: VRTS) has filed a shelf registration to raise up to $100 million through the sale of equity or debt, some of which may be for holders.

JON C. OGG

At the one end of the compensation to market cap ratio are relatively small companies that have very highly paid CEOs. At the other are chief executives at large companies who work for more modest sums and are either paid well for extraordinary financial results or have boards that believe that CEOs should not be paid like sultans

Read: America’s Least Valuable CEOs

Also Read: America’s Most Valuable CEOs

Every year, the media come out with lists of American public company CEOs who makes tens of millions of dollars. While some may have earned the money because of phenomenal results, others are paid well despite poor results. Our list of least valuable CEOs is based on chief executives who are paid handsomely, even though they run corporations with modest market caps and sales. Additionally, most of their companies have not done well, either financially or in terms of stock market performance.

Some of the companies on this list are run by founders or large shareholders. These people may well be in a position to have outsized influence over their own pay packages, which puts shareholders in an impossible position to effectively protest compensation. Other CEOs have been hired fairly recently to turn companies around. They have been paid well to take jobs in which they are expected to post great improvement, but they have not done so yet, and may never. .

24/7 Wall St. identified the least valuable CEOs based on executive pay relative to company market cap. We reviewed the market cap and CEO compensation for every S&P 500 company as of Dec. 31, 2011. If a company’s stock performance exceeded that of the S&P 500 Index between December 30th, 2011 and November 12th, 2012 it was excluded. CEOs who joined their companies or were promoted during the year in question have been included for the purpose of our measurements.

These are America’s least valuable CEOs.

Twitter has, by most estimates, 100 million members, which makes it one of the largest social networks in the world. All major media companies are on Twitter and some have more than one million Twitter users. It raises the question of whether there is wisdom in crowds.

24/7 Wall St. will look at the Twitter posts at Reuters Biz, WSJ, Financial Times, CNN Money, MarketWatch, CNBC, and 24/7 Wall St. each day to see which stocks are most frequently mentioned. It is clear that in this area of social media these tweet are a sign of which companies the Twitter universe is interested in. These financial sites are followed by a combined 625,000 Twitter users which makes them a sizeable sample of Wall St.’s interests. In some cases, we will publish the actual tweets from the sites.

Among the daily top trending  symbols on stock twitter aggregator StockTwits are Huntington Bancshares (NASDAQ: HBAN), Lihua International (NASDAQ: LIWA), Jamba, Inc. (NASDAQ: JMBA), Randgold Resources (NASDAQ: GOLD), BP plc (NYSE: BP), and China Automotive Systems (NASDAQ: CAAS).

MarketWatch: Citigroup shares move lower as Treasury to further dispose of U.S.-held stake http://on.mktw.net/apqg7a

MarketWatch: Caterpillar raises 2010 profit target as better demand sparks increased production plans http://on.mktw.net/bPK28b

Reuters Biz: Caterpillar beats forecasts, raises outlook http://link.reuters.com/zep49j

Reuters Biz: Treasury begins sale of Citigroup stake http://link.reuters.com/syn49j

FT: Greek aid depends on budget cut plans: Greece has been told to produce detailed plans this week to meet budget def… http://bit.ly/ahnSc1

CNN Money: Apple 2.0: An Apple bull issues a warning for May http://bit.ly/b9HNaI $AAPL  5 minutes ago

Douglas A. McIntyre

Sponsor: 5 best investments for 2010 – The next nine months represent a bold new era for investors.