by Peter Burrows

There are 57 Wall Street analysts in Bloomberg’s database who follow Apple Inc., and only one of them has a “sell” rating: Edward Zabitsky.

His reasoning? Zabitsky, an analyst at Toronto-based ACI Research, doubts Apple will be able to maintain the margins of its top product, the iPhone. He’s betting that a new web standard called HTML5 will overcome some of the deficiencies of web apps that led to the rise of so-called native apps, the type sold in Apple’s App Store.

Web apps — applications that are accessed through a mobile Web browser — are useless if the phone isn’t connected to the Internet. HTML5 apps will allow users to do some off-line activities, such as working on documents that can later be synched over the web. If that standard takes off, customers will be able to get to most of their favorite services without the need of Apple’s app ecosystem, he says. The move to speedier 4G cellular networks and the increased availability of Wi-Fi hotspots will also make the web apps more useful.

As a result, he expects iPhone prices to tumble to better compete with Android and Windows phones. Over time, he predicts the gross margin on the iPhone will fall from more than 50 percent to about 25 percent — roughly the same as the iPad and Mac. Or maybe worse. Since Samsung Electronics makes many of the parts used in its own phones — displays, chips, modems — it will be able to undercut everyone, including Apple.

“If a price war breaks out in Android phones, Samsung wins hands down,” he says.

Zabitsky also says cell carriers are getting tired of watching profits from iPhone sales accrue to Apple.

“I think carriers’ attitudes are already changing,” he says, citing a recent promotion in which Verizon offered more data per month to owners of Android phones.

Read the rest here.

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By JONATHAN CHENG

The Dow Jones Industrial Average hit a nearly four-year high, boosted by signs of an accelerating U.S. economic recovery and glimmers of hope on the Greek debt crisis.

The Dow surged 123.13 points, or 1%, to 12904.08. Thursday’s rise was the biggest one-day point and percentage gain in two weeks and left the blue-chip index less than 100 points from the 13000 level it last hit in May 2008. The Dow has now run higher for 34 days without a single triple-digit decline, the longest run in more than a year. All 10 sectors of the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index finished with gains.

Read the rest here.

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How a college dropout at a tiny Utah fund beat Wall Street, and why most managers are scared to copy him.

By BRETT ARENDS

On a fall day in 2010, half a dozen wealthy investors and portfolio managers converged on an office in midtown Manhattan. These were serious Wall Street moneymen; in aggregate, they handled more than a billion dollars. They had access to the most exclusive hedge funds and investment partnerships and often rubbed shoulders with the elite of New York, Greenwich and Palm Beach.

But on this day, they had turned out to meet an unknown college dropout from Utah — and to find out how he was knocking them all into a cocked hat.

The unknown, Allan Mecham, had been posting mind-bogglingly high returns for a decade at a tiny private-investment fund called Arlington Value Management, and the Wall Streeters were considering jumping on board. For nearly two hours, they peppered him with questions. Where did he get his business background? I read a lot, he replied. Did he have an MBA? No. I dropped out of college. Did he have a clever computer model or algorithm? No, he replied. I don’t use spreadsheets much. Could the group look at some of his investment analyses? I don’t have any of those either, he said. It’s all in my head. The investors were baffled. Well, could he at least tell them where he thought the stock market was headed? “I don’t know,” Mecham replied.

Read the rest here.

 

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Clare O’Connor

In one corner of Manoj Bhargava’s office is a cemetery of sorts. It’s a Formica bookcase, its shelves lined with hundreds of garishly colored screw-top plastic bottles not much taller than shot glasses. Front and center is a Cadillac-red bottle of 5-Hour Energy, the two-ounce caffeine and vitamin elixir that purports to keep you alert without crashing. In eight years 5-Hour has gone from nowhere to $1 billion in retail sales. Truckers swear by it. So do the traders in Oliver Stone’s 2010 sequel to Wall Street. So do hungover ­students. It’s $3 a bottle, and it has made Bhargava a fortune.

Read the rest here.

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Still a Better Deal
Private Investment vs. Social Security
by Michael Tanner

Opponents of allowing younger workers to privately invest a portion of their Social Security taxes through personal accounts have long pointed to the supposed riskiness of private investment. The volatility of private capital markets over the past several years, and especially recent declines in the stock market, have seemed to bolster their argument.

However, private capital investment remains remarkably safe over the long term. Despite recent declines in the stock market, a worker who had invested privately over the past 40 years would have still earned an average yearly return of 6.85 percent investing in the S&P 500, 3.46 percent from corporate bonds, and 2.44 percent from government bonds.

If workers who retired in 2011 had been allowed to invest the employee half of the Social Security payroll tax over their working lifetime, they would retire with more income than if they relied on Social Security. Indeed, even in the worst-case scenario—a low-wage worker who invested entirely in bonds—the benefits from private investment would equal those from traditional Social Security.

While there are limits and caveats to this type of analysis, it clearly shows that the argument that private investment is too risky compared with Social Security does not hold up. With Social Security already running a cashflow deficit today—and facing a $21 trillion shortfall in the future that will make it impossible to pay promised benefits—private investment and personal accounts should be part of any discussion about reforming the troubled system.

Read the rest here.

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Grace Wyler

By now, it is clear that the Maine caucuses were a complete mess.

Evidence is mounting that Mitt Romney’s 194-vote victory over Ron Paul was prematurely announced, if not totally wrong. Washington County canceled their caucus on Saturday on account of three inches of snow (hardly a blizzard by Maine standards), and other towns that scheduled their caucuses for this week have been left out of the vote count. Now, it looks like caucuses that did take place before Feb. 11 have also been left out of final tally.

As the full extent of the chaos unfolds, sources close to the Paul campaign tell Business Insider that it is looking increasingly like Romney’s team might have a hand in denying Paul votes, noting that Romney has some admirably ruthless operatives on his side and a powerful incentive to avoid a fifth caucus loss this month.

According to the Paul campaign, the Maine Republican Party is severely under-reporting Paul’s results — and Romney isn’t getting the same treatment. For example, nearly all the towns in Waldo County — a Ron Paul stronghold – held their caucuses on Feb. 4, but the state GOP reported no results for those towns. In Waterville, a college town in Central Maine, results were reported but not included in the party vote count. Paul beat Romney 21-5 there, according to the Kennebec County GOP.

“It’s too common,” senior advisor Doug Wead told Business Insider. “If it was chaos, we would expect strong Romney counties to be unreported, and that’s not what’s happening.”

The Maine Republican Party won’t decide which votes it will count until the executive committee meets next month. But Wead points out that even if Mitt Romney holds on to his slim lead, it will be a Pyrrhic victory.

“He will have disenfranchised all of these people,” Wead said. “It could be a costly victory — it is a mistake.”

The (alleged) bias against Paul may also be the product of an organic opposition to the libertarian Congressman and his army of ardent fans. Paul volunteers tend to be young and relatively new to party politics, and their presence has many state GOP stalwarts feeling territorial.

“People feel threatened — they don’t want to see a bunch of kids who may have voted for Barack Obama take over,” Wead said. “They feel a sense of ownership over the party — but there has to be an accommodation.”

But state party machinations are already starting to backfire. The Paul campaign believes it has won the majority of Maine’s delegates — and the perceived election fraud has galvanized Paul supporters to demand their votes be counted in the state’s straw poll ‘beauty contest.’

Caucus chaos has also proved to be fertile ground for Paul’s quiet takeover of the Republican Party. Since 2008, the campaign and Paul’s Campaign for Liberty PAC have made a concerted effort to get Paul sympathists involved in the political process. Now, tumult in state party organizations has allowed these supporters to rise up the ranks.

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via Washington Post

In case you needed more evidence of an impending apocalypse: Hundreds of dead birds dropped from the sky over I-95 during the Wednesday evening commute, according to WJLA.

Hundreds of dead birds lie along Morganza Highway in Pointe Coupee Parish, La., in January 2011. (Liz Condo – AP)

The deceased starlings scrambled traffic in the northbound travel lanes in Laurel and startled commuters, some of them no doubt familiar with similar events in Arkansas in early 2011 — and again this January — in which thousands of otherwise healthy birds dropped from the sky.

But don’t get excited, Doomsday theorists: Loud noises (possibly fireworks) were identified as the culprit in the January 2011 dropping, and bad weather can also send frenzied birds into stationary objects. Maryland Department of Natural Resources biologist Peter Bedel said the I-95 birds probably just flew into a truck.

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Stocks have spent the past 30 minutes working their way higher. The effort has all three major equity averages at their best levels of the day. Of particular interest, the S&P 500 is now testing its multi-month closing high. Financials have emerged as clear-cut leaders. Their upward push has the overall financial sector sporting a 1.4% gain. That move has been matched only by the Utilities sector, but utilities collectively carry only a fraction of the financial sector’s market weight.

Market update

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So recently the market has been led by a few companies with $AAPL being the star leader.

Yesterday, as Apple spiked so did the market. Apple about faced the market seemed to have fallen apart. Granted there was a lot of moving parts to yesterday’s minor sell off, but Apple seemed to have some hand in the downside.

At any rate you players know that all gaps get filled. Apple has a chance of filling three recent gap ups. One @ $480, one @ $476, and one @ $441. It might be a good idea to pay attention to these numbers.

Oddly the S&P has almost similar gap ups….

GLT

[youtube://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPS9MpRLCd0 450 300]

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I never miss a chance to hate on particular companies. This article however, is a message to those who would like to change things. Collectively you the consumer hold all the power; full stop.

[youtube://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfKXCaPvmrM&feature=related 450 300]

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The internals of politics and money…

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[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxw4uZAezaI 450 300]

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I wonder if the accident rate is highest in that zone ?

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Apparently not many at all. Some of you have commented that i need to stop hating on the industry, but the industry is in no short supply of idiocy to mock; plus those mofos need to got to jail.

Full article

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[youtube://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGRBq5fjFjc 450 300]

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A sad request if you ask me…..

Another article on the subject…

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Heat Map

A/D Line 

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ISSUE GAINERS                 SYMBOL   EXCH   LAST PRICE   MONEY FLOW    RATIO 
                                                          (in millions) 
Crown Castle Intl              CCI     NYSE       50.31       +17.2       8.53 
ConocoPhillips                 COP     NYSE       72.27       +16.0       2.24 
IBM                            IBM     NYSE      192.74       +12.8       1.59 
Intel                          INTC    NASD       26.64       +11.6       1.93 
Cisco Systems                  CSCO    NASD       20.06       +10.5       2.03 
ExxonMobil                     XOM     NYSE       84.60        +9.8       1.61 
Devon Energy                   DVN     NYSE       73.13        +8.2       1.45 
Procter & Gamble               PG      NYSE       64.83        +7.7       1.81 
PepsiCo                        PEP     NYSE       63.19        +7.2       1.93 
PwrShs DB USD Bullish          UUP     ARCA       22.26        +7.0       4.05 
Delphi Automotive              DLPH    NYSE       29.43        +6.9       8.64 
iShrs Tr MSCI EAFE             EFA     ARCA       53.52        +6.4       1.98 
DirecTV Group Inc              DTV     NASD       45.90        +6.4       1.24 
Marriott Intl                  MAR     NYSE       34.40        +6.2       1.75 
Pfizer                         PFE     NYSE       21.15        +6.1       2.61 
Qualcomm                       QCOM    NASD       61.69        +6.1       1.48 
Chevron                        CVX     NYSE      105.10        +5.9       1.65 
AT&T                           T       NYSE       29.92        +5.7       1.74 
Caterpillar                    CAT     NYSE      113.12        +5.7       1.24 
Goldman Sachs                  GS      NYSE      111.95        +5.5       1.24 

ISSUE DECLINERS               SYMBOL   EXCH   LAST PRICE   MONEY FLOW    RATIO 
                                                          (in millions) 
Apple                          AAPL    NASD      490.27      -181.9       0.86 
Bank Of America                BAC     NYSE        7.69       -39.8       0.51 
PG&E                           PCG     NYSE       41.58       -29.1       0.11 
Google                         GOOG    NASD      600.17       -22.3       0.82 
SPDR S&P 500                   SPY     ARCA      134.77       -19.1       0.92 
Deere & Co                     DE      NYSE       83.31       -15.2       0.64 
Bristow Group                  BRS     NYSE       47.80       -14.2       0.02 
PwrShrs QQQ Tr Series 1        QQQ     NASD       62.81       -13.8       0.72 
Lazard                         LAZ     NYSE       28.10       -13.1       0.22 
Freeport McMoran               FCX     NYSE       42.76       -13.0       0.71 
SPDR S&P Homebuilders          XHB     ARCA       19.98       -12.4       0.13 
Coca-Cola                      KO      NYSE       68.60       -12.0       0.31 
Banco Sant Brasil ADS          BSBR    NYSE       10.54       -11.2       0.23 
CF Ind Hldgs                   CF      NYSE      175.98        -9.9       0.76 
General Electric               GE      NYSE       18.88        -9.8       0.45 
Scripps Netwrks Inter A        SNI     NYSE       43.04        -9.6       0.07 
Morgan Stanley                 MS      NYSE       18.25        -9.1       0.64 
JPMorgan Chase                 JPM     NYSE       37.21        -9.1       0.52 
Johnson & Johnson              JNJ     NYSE       64.69        -8.4       0.48 
Cliffs Ntrl Res                CLF     NYSE       66.04        -8.3       0.72

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