Reuters: China’s economy may be hurt as its stimulus ends.
Reuters: Warren Buffett says the financial panic is over.
Reuters: Former bankers are considering buying failed banks.
Reuters: The SEC is expected to go ahead with the Bear Stearns case. Read More
CBS (NYSE:CBS) and Sirius XM (NYSE:SIRI) pose the greatest investment risks among media companies based on a forensic measure of their transparency and the statistical reliability of their financial reporting and governance practices, according to new data from Audit Integrity. The probability for bankruptcy for Sirius is 8.5% and 4.6% for CBS. Both numbers are remarkably low, but still high for major US companies. Audit Integrity’s bankruptcy model achieved 90.9% accuracy in 2008 and 93.8% in 2009.
The safest companies for investors, based on the same measurement are Disney (NYSE:DIS) and DirecTV (NYSE:DTV). The rest of the firms in the analysis are Time Warner (NYSE:TWX), Viacom (NYSE:VIA), Comcast (NYSE:CMCSA), Cablevision, (NYSE:CVC), GE (NYSE:GE), and Time Warner Cable (NYSE:TWC). Read More
The Walt Disney Company (NYSE: DIS) is out with earnings and the report is a solid one compared to what we have seen elsewhere, yet it too saw mostly erosion in its business segments. For the quarter, the Mouse House posted $0.47 EPS compared to $0.40 in the prior-year quarter, but that figure had gains from the Lifetime/A&E transaction and restructuring and impairment charges, which together resulted in a net benefit of $0.01. If you back out all items, the company is showing a 5% earnings gain to $0.46 EPS. Revenues were down 4% year over year to $9.867 billion. Thomson Reuters had estimates at $0.41 EPS and $9.27 billion in revenues. The units are where the story sounds worse than the raw figures.
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Reuters: China is the key stop on Obama’s tour of Asia.
Reuters: South Korea’s businesses may start to feel more pressure from China competitors..
Reuters: Hewlett-Packard (NYSE:HPQ) bought 3Com (NYSE:COM) for $3.1 billion.
Reuters: Lou Dobbs left CNN (NYSE:TWX) Read More
McDonald’s (NYSE:MCD) spends a great deal of its test kitchen time trying to beat the clock. It has occurred to the fast food chain that a customer who expects to wait 30 seconds for a meal may leave after a minute if his food is not ready. The world’s largest restaurant operator has its own Innovation Center where management works out the kinks of serving food hot and on time. Read More
Earnings season has wound down now with over 85% of the S&P 500 Index having reported. Still, there are some key companies posting their quarterly results and some companies were screened out of this list which are still actively traded or widely held stocks. Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ: ERTS), Energy Conversion Devices, Inc. (NASDAQ: ENER), Priceline.com Inc. (NASDAQ: PCLN) and Sequenom Inc. (NASDAQ: SQNM) are on deck Monday. Also this week are earnings from Tyco International Ltd. (NYSE: TYC), Applied Materials Inc. (NASDAQ: AMAT), Macy’s, Inc. (NYSE: M), are Nordstrom Inc. (NYSE: JWN). Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (NYSE: WMT) and Walt Disney Co. (NYSE: DIS) are our two DJIA components reporting this week.
We have included Thomson Reuters consensus estimates and included performance and other important color where applicable. We have shown the share performance since the March 9 close that traders mark as the official end date of the bloody bear market. One issue to consider is that we used the performance since June 30 to keep consistency for our prior previews even though some of the quarter-ends this coming week are technically August 31.
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Reuters: Opel must now arrange for GM’s unexpected ownership
Reuters: The Fed will probably keep its “easy money” program.
Reuters: Toyota (NYSE:TM) will pull out of Formula 1 racing.
Reuters: The IEA will cut its long-term oil demand outlook. Read More
China has approved a plan for Disney (NYSE:DIS) to build a theme part in Shanghai. The American entertainment company has been trying to get a go ahead to build the $4 billion project for several years. The Chinese government gave no reason for the timing of its announcement. Shortly after the news became public, Chinese residents began to attack plans to build the park. The Wall Street Journal reports that, based on online polls and comments “Walt Disney won’t make Shanghai the happiest place in the world.”
Disney joins a long list of companies from Dell (NASDAQ:DELL) to Wal-Mart (NYSE:WMT) to McDonald’s (NYSE:MCD) and Ford (NYSE:F) which are willing to bet that the Chinese consumer will eventually become a critical part of the expansion of the economy in the world’s most populous country. China’s GDP has been driven by exports. The US, where most consumer-focused firms have made their profits over the years, has counted on those consumers to be the engine of its economic expansion. Read More
There are a number of ways to rank brand values. One of the most important is the level at which a brand contributes to the market value of a public company.
24/7 Wall St. asked Corebrand, the brand research and consulting firm, to look at the top 100 brands based their contribution to market capitalizaton. Using this method, the hardest working brand was Hershey (NYSE:HSY), followed by Coca-Cola (NYSE:KO) and Harley-Davidson (NYSE:HOG)
Corebrand described the process briefly to 24/7 Wall. St.
24/7 Wall St.: Corebard often refers to the brands on this list as the”hardest working brands”. How did you come to that description?
Corebrand: There are a lot of people measuring and examining the “strongest brands” or the “most valuable brands”. Our opinion is that examining one without the other is somewhat meaningless. How “strong” a brand is nice to know but not very relevant unless you understand how that strength benefits business. Similarly, “value” is little more than a measure of corporate size unless you understand the drivers of that value and how to influence it. By examining the strength of the brand and it’s contribution to total market value, we can help companies and their leadership manage that strength and value over time.
24/7 Wall St.: Is there any advantage or disadvantage to having a brand value be a very large percentage of market cap in the present and as an indication of a company’s future performance?
Corebrand: The brand will need to be in balance with the rest of the company’s assets. A company should strive to have it’s brand strong enough to fend off competitors or changing market conditions but not so strong that it becomes overly dependent on the brand as a single driver of value. If a company can achieve and maintain its appropriate maximum strength without becoming over-dependent, it will see greater returns in bull markets and retain greater value in bear markets.
The list: Read More
Reuters: E-mails and the credit crisis will be key to the trial of Bear Stearns workers.
Reuters: The approval process for Tengzhong to buy Hummer has started in China.
Reuters: Philips Electronics (NYSE:PHG) beat expectations.
Reuters: Liz Claiborne’s (NYSE:LIZ) decision to sell its brands at J C Penny (NYSE:JCP) should help both companies. Read More
These are this Wednesday mornings top pre-market analyst upgrades and positive research calls we have seen early on from Wall Street:
Abercrombie & Fitch (NYSE: ANF) Raised to Equal Weight at Morgan Stanley.
Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO) Raised to Outperform at William Blair.
Coca-Cola (NYSE: KO) Raised to Buy at Deutsche Bank.
Goodrich (NYSE: GR) Raised to Outperform at FBR Capital.
Harmony Gold (NYSE: HMY) Raised to Buy at Nomura.
Kohl’s (NYSE: KSS) Raised to Overweight at Morgan Stanley.
News Corp (NWS-A) Raised to Buy at BofA/Merrill Lynch.
The Walt Disney Co. (NYSE: DIS) Raised to Neutral at BofA/Merrill Lynch.
Viacom B (VIA-B) Raised to Neutral at BofA/Merrill Lynch.
You can join our open email distribution list which goes out several times per week for reminders of the top day trader alerts, analyst upgrades and downgrades, IPO’s, key secondary offerings, guru investor data on Buffett and others, mergers, and more.
JON C. OGG
Reuters: The pay czar plans to rework employee pay at large banks.
Reuters: Hewlett-Packard (NYSE:HPQ) may enter the tech M&A frenzy.
Reuters: Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) says some Hotmail passwords were exposed.
Reuters: The US called for rigorous IMF surveillance to spot new investment bubbles. Read More
Reuters: The young and affluent in China may become more active consumers.
Reuters: The G20 is looking to nurture the recovery and add financial safeguards.
Reuters: Taxpayers may never get back all of their US bailout funds.
Reuters: The Fed says the recovery in under way. Read More
Reuters: Obama is asking the G 20 to reshape the global economy.
Reuters: Congress will demand details of the Bank of America/Merrill Lynch deal.
Reuters: Holiday spending is expected to be flat.
Reuters: It may be too late to catch the turnaround in eBay’s (EBAY) stock. Read More
Several consulting firms post annual figures for the world’s most valuable brands. The two best known are probably the Interbrand and BrandZ surveys. They are notably different, up until now at least. BrandZ includes a number of large brands from Asia. Interbrand does not.
24/7 Wall St. has put together a list of the most valuable brands of 2009 by looking at valuation calculations from a number of sources. Then a base valuation was taken from the 2008 Interbrand data to fix values for this year and changes from last.
Most methods take into account the future earnings of a brand for its parent company. This is fundamentally a guess particularly during a turbulent period in the global economy. Interbrand’s rule is that a brand most get at least a third of its revenue from outside its country-of-origin. That is arbitrary, particularly as it apply to brands in China.
24/7 Wall St. has made the assumption that the value of most brands have been hurt log-term by the deep recession. Forward earnings estimates for many of the firms on this list show that. Those brands which post value improvements show much more modest increases than they would be in a stable economy.
Looking at the Interbrand list from last year, it is fair to ask why firms like Nissan, Wal-Mart (WMT) and Red Bull are not present.
Because the brands on this list are taken from names on the Interbrand survey, we have not made a calculation about which companies may be new to their list in 2009 or which may drop off.
Public firms which are part of this ranking include (KO)(IBM)(MSFT)(GOOG)(GE)(NOK)(TM)(INTC)(MCD)(DIS)(HPQ)(AXP)(C)(HMC)(ORCL)(AAPL)(SNE)(PEP)(HBC)(NKE)(UPS)(FDX)(SAP)(DELL)(JPM)(GS)(KL)(EBAY)(SI)(F)(AIG)(AMZN)(CAT)(AVP)(RIMM)(GPS)(TIF)(BP)(SBUX)(JNJ)(MAR)(V)
The 100: Read More
Most of the news yesterday was dominated by the news that Charles Gibson would leave as anchor of the ABC Evening News and be replaced by Diane Sawyer. Since almost no one under 60-years-old watches the news in the early evening which makes the programs unattractive to advertisers, the news about the ABC Evening News does not mean much. Read More
Reuters: The sell-off in Chinese stocks may be overdone based on earnings.
Reuters: A report blamed the SEC for not doing its job investigating Madoff.
Reuters: The Fed says the risks to the American economy have dropped.
Reuters: A Pfizer (PFE) whistleblower made more than $51 million. Read More
Reuters: Sales growth of Ford (F) and Hyundai topped other car companies.
Reuters: The EU could slow a takeover of Sun (JAVA) by Oracle (ORCL).
Reuters: Home sales and factory orders signaled an end to the recession.
Reuters: Executives a bailed out banks may make millions on stock options. Read More
These are this Tuesday’s early analyst downgrades and cautious research calls which we have seen from Wall Street research firms:
Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) Cut to Neutral at Credit Suisse.
American Axle (AXL) Cut to Hold at Deutsche Bank.
Disney (DIS) Cut to Hold at Lazard.
Nokia (NOK) Cut to Underperform at Credit Suisse.
QUALCOMM (QCOM) Cut to Neutral at Credit Suisse.
Verizon (VZ) Cut to HOLD at Auriga.
JON C. OGG
Reuters: Ebay (EBAY) will sell Skype to private investors.
Reuters: China’s manufacturing index gained.
Reuters: A late Labor Day will hurt August retail sales.
Reuters: A US judge ruled against AIG (AIG) in a dispute with its former CEO. Read More
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