skepticllc submits:
It’s been a good first few months for the recommendations I have posted, but the entire market has been in a sharp rally mode. Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good. A brief update on each of the long positions I have outlined is as follows:
- Opnext Inc. (OPXT): Up 24% since 2/4/10
A big part of this gain has come in the past couple of trading days, seemingly in reaction to news about a successful test of their technology, coupled with a similar announcement by Cisco (CSCO). (I believe these were two different tests, but the timing of the announcements on the same day was puzzling.) Volume has been very large on the increase, leading me to believe that people are looking at this as a derivative play on Cisco’s new products. All good news, but I haven’t seen anything about how soon this translates into sales/profits, so I’d look for an exit around $3 when the gap to fair value is closer to the 25%.
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Internet Initiative Japan (IIJI) (3774) is a Japanese internet service provider offering a full suite of connectivity and outsourcing services. It is a pioneer among Japanese internet-related companies, having originally listed its shares on the Nasdaq in 1999, before eventually listing in Tokyo (Mothers) in 2005 and later transitioning to Topix 1st Section.
At the end of February, I submitted a letter to the company’s chairman (Mr. Suzuki) and its other directors. While applauding them for their prior decision to repurchase shares, the timing of which coincided with the bottoming of IIJ’s stock, and also for maintaining the dividend, I voiced some concerns and submitted proposals that are either to be actioned or designated for resolution at the Annual Shareholders’ Meeting this June. IIJ’s Investor Relations Officer has been helpful and cordial, and has already forwarded my letter and proposals. Below, I will briefly outline my position.
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Greentech Media submits:
Sleep saved Starwood Hotels and Resorts (HOT) $350,000 in 2009.
The company initiated a program in 2007 to put employee PCs into sleep mode after an hour of inactivity, according to Mark McBeth, Vice President IT, North America for Starwood. IT managers often come up with these sorts of programs, but the goals can get sidetracked when employees reset their computers. (The system also does an early sleep on desktop monitors.)
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Michael Fitzsimmons submits:
The United States uses ~25% of the world’s oil and imports ~65% of it. The economic, environmental, and national security issues arising from this dependence on foreign oil are obvious. The chart below summarizes American wealth transferred overseas to purchase the oil it must have.
|
Year
|
Barrels of Oil Imported
|
Money Sent Overseas
|
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2008
|
|
$475,000,000,000
|
|
2009
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4,350,000,000 barrels
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$265,000,000,000
|
|
2010 (January only)
|
351,000,000 barrels
|
$27,500,000,000
|
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Chuck Carnevale submits:
History
Oak Brook, Illinois based McDonald’s is the leading fast food hamburger chain in the world.
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S.E.Wells submits:
Rubicon Minerals (RBY) reported some new information on its F2 zone on March 9th, 2010. See here for details.
As an investor in Rubicon, I’ve been trying to make sense of the information available to me about this discovery. It will be some time before a 43-101 compliant resource statement is available because it’s an underground deposit and more drilling needs to be done to meet those exacting standards.
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The Inflection Point submits:
Powerful inflection points are characterized by companies that have recently experienced a dramatic improvement in their fundamentals. Important inflection points often coincide with a breakthrough earnings report that is soon followed by a surge in both the stock and the volume accompanying the breakout. UFP Technologies (UFPT) experienced such an inflection point last week.
UFP Technologies is a company which designs and manufactures engineered packaging solutions for the automotive, computer, medical, aerospace, military and consumer markets. After three accretive acquisitions last year and an underlying improvement in overall demand, UFPT posted a breakthrough earnings report on Wednesday morning. Earnings grew 150% year-over-year to $.45 a share as revenues grew 11.4% higher to $26.1 million. Along with these record profits, the company also achieved record gross margins of 31%.
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Tom Armistead submits:
Successful trades are boring – I keep notes in ACT! (a contact manager) for each buy/sell decision I make on stocks in my portfolio, two or three paragraphs to track what I was thinking at the time. My best trades don’t make good reading – an opening entry summarizing my initial impression and valuation, followed by two entries saying I bought it because it was cheap and sold it because it was fairly priced. In the meantime, there might be notes on analyst upgrades/downgrades or material events of one kind or another.
But my losing trades sometimes accumulate voluminous notes – repetitious analyses, observations of minutiae about market action, quarter after quarter of conference calls, strategic revisions in an effort to find a way to make money on the case, etc. Perhaps I should just set a cut-off figure, once I get over 7 (maybe 10) entries to just close the case out and go on to something else.
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Zacks.com submits:
Earnings estimates for chipmaker Xilinx Inc (XLNX) have been increasing following the release of solid results for the third quarter of fiscal 2010.
California-based Xilinx designs and manufactures a broad range of high-performance, high-density programmable logic devices (PLDs) such as field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and complex-programmable logic devices (CPLDs).
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Zacks.com submits:
BMC Software Inc. (BMC) is winning new customers at regular intervals. The company’s superior product quality, innovative service offerings and aggressive marketing strategy are helping to win these major deals. The ongoing revival in IT spending across the globe is also a benefit.
Latest among these is a deal win from Australia’s Monash University. This university has selected BMC Software’s Business Service Management (BSM) platform to support its information and communication technology (ICT) services. This new platform developed jointly by Monash and BMC will manage IT services for more than 50,000 students across six Victorian campuses. Although a major deal, the company did not disclose the monetary value.
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Kurt Wulff (McDep Associates) submits:
Contrarian Buy-recommended Marathon Oil (MRO) offers unlevered appreciation potential of 47% to a McDep Ratio of 1.0 where stock price would equal Net Present Value (NPV) of US$53 a share. Fourth quarter results released on February 2 disclose unlevered cash flow (Ebitda) below our expectations of three months ago. Upstream costs resulted in a low Ebitda margin and downstream reflected a more depressed refining margin.
Executive Vice President Gary Heminger explains on the earnings call that refining profits are likely to recover with rebounding demand for diesel fuel in a growing global economy. At the same time, increased reported reserves in Canadian oil sands supports NPV in an industry context judged by cash flow and reserve life.
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Daniel Eskin submits:
In our first edition of Expert Interview, Y&I is very excited to bring you the insights of Puru Saxena, founder of Puru Saxena Wealth Management. Based in Hong Kong, Puru has his finger on the pulse of the East markets, and provides investment advice and asset management for numerous clients. As a highly regarded member of the finance community, Puru is a regular guest on various media such as CNN, BBC, Bloomberg TV, CNBC, RTHK, NDTV, TVB Pearl … need we say more?
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Shlomi Cohen submits:
I am adding to my portfolio an Israeli company that provides bandwidth management solutions, especially on cellular networks, Allot Communications (ALLT). At the same time, I am removing Incredimail (MAIL), after making a profit of 58% in nine months, and I do so just before the release of the fourth quarter results, probably this week, as the stock has shown continuous weakness since reaching a peak of almost $11 in the summer. I believe the weakness results from the share sales by one of the founders, Yaron Adler, who is no longer a director, and / or because of a large acquisition the company is about to make.
Allot provides solutions for managing loads with systems that do optimization through what is known in the professional jargon as DPI (deep packet inspection), which means monitoring the content on the networks and deciding on priorities and allocation of bandwidth to users according to the policies of the service provider. For example, the provider will prefer to allocate more bandwidth to a business customer, who pays a great deal of money, when he is conducting video conference calls over the IP network, and less to a user watching a clip on YouTube for pleasure via a smartphone.
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The Gold Report submits:
The Gold Report caught up with John Embry, Chief Investment Strategist, Sprott Asset Management, to get his thoughts on gold and some mining stocks he favors. Embry, an industry expert in precious metals, has researched the gold sector for over 30 years. Read about why he thinks gold could gain another 30% this year as a greater proportion of the public realizes the degree of difficulty that sovereign debt is in. He believes as confidence in gold returns, people will seek an outlet in gold stocks, especially small-cap gold producers and junior explorers with solid projects.
The Gold Report: John, in Investors Digest of Canada, you recently said you’re expecting gold to gain another 30% this year.
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Nicholas Marshi submits:
If you take a big picture view of the Business Development Company (BDC) industry, there is no question that matters are looking up. Stock prices are jumping, dividends are being maintained or raised and balance sheets are being rejiggered to take advantage of the nascent recovery.
Nonetheless, it’s not all easy sailing for investors in this space as the news from three very different companies has underscored in recent weeks. We thought it would be interesting to compare and contrast recent developments at Main Street Capital (MAIN), Hercules Technology (HTGC) and Medallion Financial (TAXI).
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Investing, Long Term Investment, stock market | admin March 10, 2010 | 
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