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Monthly Archives: February 2012

U.S. Equity Preview: QCOR, PPO, LTD, & AWAY

Source

HomeAway Inc. (AWAY) (AWAY US): The online vacation-rental service reported forecast revenue in the first quarter will be no more than $64 million, falling short of the average analyst estimate of $65.8 million.

Limited Brands Inc. (LTD) : The owner of the Victoria’s Secret lingerie chain forecast first-quarter earnings will be no more than 40 cents a share, missing the average analyst estimate by 4 cents.

Polypore International Inc. (PPO) : The maker of battery components reported fourth-quarter earnings excluding some items of 58 cents a share, missing the average analyst estimate by 1 cent.

Questcor Pharmaceuticals Inc. (QCOR) : The drug company reported fourth-quarter profit excluding some items of 47 cents a share, exceeding the average analyst estimate by 4 cents.

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Gapping Up and Down This Morning

Gapping up

VVUS +110.4%, ONVI +30.6%, OREX +23.1%, ARNA +14.4%, QIHU +8.6%, QCOR +5.6%, RIG +5.1%, PVA +4.9%, MEG +4.8%, RGR +3.8%, LOOP +3.1%,

WLL +2.9%, ONXX +2.9%, MT +2.3%, SGY +2.3%, SNTS +2.2%, UBS +1.9%, ANW +1.7%, BCS +1.5%, CLR +1.5%, GOLD +2%, RIO +1%, BBL +1%,

SLV +0.5%, BHP +0.3%, LYG +4.1%, ING +1.8%, CS +1.5%, UBS +1.1%, BCS +1.1%, BAC +1%, MS +0.9%, C +0.4%, ONXX +2.9%,CLR +1.5%, ROIC +1.5% ,

DNDN +2%,  LL +1.7%,

Gapping down

PPO -12.7%, GNK -10.5%, SMSI -7.3%, AWAY -5%, LTD -2.8%, PSEC -2.7%, ADI -2.4%, CXO -1.7%, HPQ -1.5%, AVGO -1.5%, FLR -1.3%, TSL -4.2%, HPQ -3.8%,

NIHD -3.7% , KBR -1.5%, ESRX -1.2%, ADI -2.4%, CXO -1.8% , JASO -2.4%, SOL -2.1%, STP -2.0%, SPWR -1.7%, FSLR -1.1%,  MCOX -8.4% ,

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Upgrades and Downgrades This Morning

Source

Brocade Communications Systems Inc. (NASDAQ: BRCD) Reiterated Hold at Argus.
Cabela’s, Inc. (NYSE: CAB) named as value stock of the day at Zacks.
Chesapeake Energy Corporation (NYSE: CHK) Reiterated Neutral at Credit Suisse.
CNOOC Ltd (NYSE: CEO) Cut to Neutral at Credit Suisse.
Excel Maritime Carriers (NYSE: EXM) Cut to Underperform as Bear of the Day at Zacks.
Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ) Reiterated Neutral at Credit Suisse.
Juniper Networks Inc. (NYSE: JNPR) Cut to Market Perform at FBR.
Level 3 Communications Inc. (NASDAQ: LVLT) Raised to Overweight at Morgan Stanley.
LM Ericsson Telephone Company (NASDAQ: ERIC) Raised to Overweight at JPMorgan.
MercadoLibre (NASDAQ: MELI) Cut to Neutral at JPMorgan.
PetroChina Company Limited (NYSE: PTR) Raised to Outperform at Credit Suisse.
Pool Corporation (NASDAQ: POOL) named Bull of the Day at Zacks.
TJX Companies Inc. (NYSE: TJX) Reiterated Hold at Argus.
VIVUS, Inc. (NASDAQ: VVUS) reiterated Outperform but raised target to $36.00 at Credit Suisse; Raised to Hold at Brean Murray.

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ALBERT EDWARDS: Dear Investors: Prepare For The Market To Rip Out Your Hope, And Consume It In Front Of Your Eyes

All aboard!

Well this is going to be the hot read of the day.

SocGen’s Albert Edwards blasts the recent stock-market rally, and says there’s still way too much “hope.” Only when the hope is totally gone will we know the great ice age is over.

One key lesson from Japan is that an essential ingredient to the end of a long valuation bear market is revulsion. It is when buyers-on-dips become sellers-on-rallies. It is when volume dries up to almost nothing. It is the loss of hope.

In Japan we saw huge rallies in the Nikkei on the back of short-lived cyclical recoveries. Each cyclical failure and further new lows in the equity market saw hope being progressively crushed. Previous US valuation bear markets typically take 4 or 5 recessions to fully play out. We have only had two.

The market is once again in a hope phase hoping that the US is now in a self-sustaining recovery; hoping that China might be soft-landing; hoping that the Greece bailout and the ECB liquidity polices have settled things down in the eurozone. These bursts of hope are essential in long bear markets. Essential in the sense that hope must be crushed. It will be crushed. Hope still beats in the breasts of equity investors. The market will rip out that hope and consume it in front of investors’ eyes. Only then can the bull market begin.

As evidence that the current hope will be quashed again like last year, he posts this chart…

 

chart

Read more: http://trade.cc/aoqi#ixzz1nDBquqw1

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Wife of Assassinated Iranian Nuclear Scientist: ‘Annihilation of Israel His Ultimate Goal’

TEHRAN (FNA)- The wife of Martyr Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan Behdast, who was assassinated by Mossad agents in Tehran in January, reiterated on Tuesday that her husband sought the annihilation of the Zionist regime wholeheartedly.

“Mostafa’s ultimate goal was the annihilation of Israel,” Fatemeh Bolouri Kashani told FNA on Tuesday.

Bolouri Kashani also underlined that her spouse loved any resistance figure in his life who was willing to fight the Zionist regime and supported the rights of the oppressed Palestinian nation.

Iran’s 32-year-old Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan Behdast, a chemistry professor and a deputy director of commerce at Natanz uranium enrichment facility, was assassinated during the morning rush-hour in the capital early January. His driver was also killed in the terrorist attack.

Roshan was killed on the second anniversary of the martyrdom of Iranian university professor and nuclear scientist, Massoud Ali Mohammadi, who was also assassinated in a terrorist bomb attack in Tehran in January 2010.

The method used for Roshan’s assassination was similar to the 2010 terrorist bomb attacks against the then university professor, Fereidoun Abbassi Davani – who is now the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization – and his colleague Majid Shahriari. Abbasi Davani survived the attack, while Shahriari was martyred.

Another Iranian scientist, Dariush Rezaeinejad, was also assassinated through the same method on 23 July 2011.

Iran has condemned the CIA, MI6 and Mossad for the five assassinations.

A series of CIA reports revealed that Israeli Mossad agents, posing as American spies, have recruited members of the terrorist organization Jundollah to stage terrorist operations against Iran.

Foreign Policy magazine cites CIA memos from 2007-2008 that Mossad recruited members of Jundollah terror group to fight a covert war against Tehran.

Buried deep in the archives of America’s intelligence services are a series of memos, written during the last years of President George W. Bush’s administration, that describe how Israeli Mossad officers recruited operatives belonging to the terrorist group Jundollah by passing themselves off as American agents. According to two US intelligence officials, the Israelis, flush with American dollars and toting US passports, posed as CIA officers in recruiting Jundollah operatives – what is commonly referred to as a “false flag” operation.

The sources – one of whom has read the memos and another who is intimately familiar with the case – said the memos investigated and debunked reports from 2007 and 2008 accusing the CIA, at the direction of the White House, of covertly supporting Jundollah – a Pakistan-based extremist organization responsible for numerous terrorist attacks against Iranian civilians and military officials. Even according to the US government and published reports, Jundollah is responsible for assassinating Iranian government officials and killing Iranian women and children.

Source

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Tesla Motors’ Devastating Design Problem: It’s A Brick

Tesla Motors’ lineup of all-electric vehicles — its existing Roadster, almost certainly its impending Model S, and possibly its future Model X — apparently suffer from a severe limitation that can largely destroy the value of the vehicle. If the battery is ever totally discharged, the owner is left with what Tesla describes as a “brick”: a completely immobile vehicle that cannot be started or even pushed down the street. The only known remedy is for the owner to pay Tesla approximately $40,000 to replace the entire battery. Unlike practically every other modern car problem, neither Tesla’s warranty nor typical car insurance policies provide any protection from this major financial loss.

Here’s how it happens.

Despite this “brick” scenario having occurred several times already, Tesla has publicly downplayed the severity of battery depletion risk to both existing owners and future buyers. Privately though, Tesla has gone to great lengths to prevent this potentially brand-destroying incident from happening more often, including possibly engaging in GPS tracking of a vehicle without the owner’s knowledge.

Read the rest here.

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Prepare for a Golden Age of Gas

The world is in the midst of a natural gas revolution. Even the sober International Energy Agency refers to a scenario it calls a “golden age of gas”. If such optimism proves right, the implications would not only be far greater than those of the eurozone’s painful dissolution, but would also be economically positive. Never forget that ours is a civilisation built on cheap supplies of commercial energy. The economic rise of emerging countries is bound to make the demand for commercial energy increase dramatically in the decades ahead. Gas matters.

This revolution has a name: “hydraulic fracturing”, colloquially known as “hydrofracking” or just “fracking”. As is true of nearly all of the technological revolutions of the past century, this one also originated in the US. The US Energy Information Administration explains that “[t]he use of horizontal drilling in conjunction with hydraulic fracturing has greatly expanded the ability of producers to produce natural gas from low permeability geologic formations, particularly shale formations.”*

While some innovations date to the 1970s, the EIA notes that “the advent of large-scale shale gas production did not occur until Mitchell Energy and Development Corporation experimented during the 1980s and 1990s to make deep shale gas production a commercial reality in the Barnett Shale in North-Central Texas.” But, by now, it adds, “[t]he development of shale gas has become a ‘game changer’ for the US natural gas market.”

The new activity has increased dry shale gas production in the US from 0.39tn cubic feet in 2000 to 4.8tn cubic feet in 2010, or 23 per cent of US dry gas production. Vastly more is to come. The EIA estimates 860tn cubic feet of “technically recoverable” US shale gas against just 273tn cubic feet in today’s “proved reserves”. If this estimate is correct, shale gas on its own would give the US 40 years of gas consumption, at current rates.

How large are the world’s shale gas reserves? The EIA asked consultants to examine 48 shale gas basins in 32 countries. Their report estimates “technically recoverable” global shale gas resources at 6,600tn cubic feet, roughly equal to today’s proved reserves. The largest identified resources, apart from those of the US, are in China (1,275tn cubic feet), Argentina (774tn), Mexico (681tn) South Africa (485tn), Australia (396tn), Canada (388tn), Libya (290tn), Algeria (231tn), Brazil (226tn), Poland (187tn) and France (180tn). Regions excluded from this analysis include Russia, central Asia, the Middle East, south-east Asia and central Africa. Global potential should be far larger still.

Read the rest here.

 

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Wine Cache Rescues those Short of Cash

By Leslie Gevirtz

NEW YORK | Wed Feb 22, 2012 2:50pm EST

Feb 22 (Reuters) – Some U.S. pawnbrokers are taking liquid assets – literally.

Fine wines are among the items they will accept as collateral for loans, along with family jewels and fine art, as a practice common in Britain and France catches on across the Atlantic.

Liquidity issues, or a cash shortage, can be found on most rungs of the economic ladder, the pawnbrokers said.

“You’d be amazed by how many wealthy individuals have terrible credit ratings. And besides, if you go to a bank, it can take weeks or months to get a loan. When we make a loan, it’s usually the same day,” said Jordan Tabach-Bank, head of Beverly Loan Co.

In an office above a Bank of America Corp branch in Beverly Hills, California, home to some of Hollywood’s biggest stars, the pawnshop for the prosperous regularly lends to hedge-fund managers, bankers, lawyers, doctors – and occasionally to Oscar winners.

“Most people have a vision of pawn shops as sad sites. But that’s not the case here,” Tabach-Bank said. “I have a lot of people who come in who have a business opportunity and they need an infusion of cash for business purposes,” he said.

USGoldBuyers.com, an online pawnbroker with an office in New York City’s diamond district, will also accept fine wines as collateral, spokesman Jose Caba said. While the wealthy like their “expensive toys, unfortunately, sometimes they don’t have the liquid assets so to speak, to keep up their toys. That’s where we come in.”

“We don’t really want to sell the wine, or any asset that we take in whether it be gold or fine art,” Caba said. About 90 percent of the loans made have been repaid, he estimated.

Interest rates and length of the loans vary widely.

Read the rest here.

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Wall Street Confounded as Volatility Extends Record Stretch

Duke Buchan III’s $1 billion hedge fund beat U.S. stocks by 46 percent in the decade through March, a period that included the steepest equity-market losses since the 1930s.

Then came the selloff in August when global stocks suffered their worst nine-day drop since the 2008 financial crisis. For four days, The Dow Jones Industrial Average (INDU) alternated between gains and losses of more than 400 points, the longest streak ever, and its intraday swings have averaged twice the level seen during the first seven months of the year. Last week, Buchan told clients he is shutting his firm Hunter Global Investors LP.

“Markets seem to be driven more by the latest news out of Europe than by a company’s earnings prospects,” Buchan, 48, said in a Dec. 8 investor letter. “We have not weathered the ensuing volatility well.”

Traders who used to profit from price swings are struggling as record stock market volatility shows no signs of abating. Hedge funds are on track to post their second-worst year on record, with managers such as John Paulson seeing bets undermined by Europe’s two-year sovereign-debt crisis and concerns over the U.S. economic recovery. U.S. mutual funds are headed for their second-weakest year of deposits in two decades, and the top Wall Street banks posted their worst quarter in trading and investment banking since the depths of the 2008 financial crisis.

Jeffrey Kronthal, a former Merrill Lynch & Co. senior fixed-income executive, said he’s never seen so much volatility over such a long period as this in his 33-year trading career.

Read the rest here.

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