“Well, not necessarily, but while Apple’s stock continues to grind lower, Google’s stock is on a tear.

And now analysts are jumping over themselves to get more bullish on Google.

Just yesterday, two separate analysts put $1,000 price targets on the stock.

What gives? Well, of course people can make up all kinds of stories about the momentum of either company, and their products and so forth.

But there’s a bigger macro-market story as well.

Throughout recent years, Apple has basically been an asset class on its own: Gold, commodities, stocks, bonds, and Apple.

If you were in Apple, your portfolio did great. If you weren’t, you almost certainly lagged the market. End of story.

At a time when people were uncertain about markets, Apple was a solid store of value. A company growing at abnormal speeds at a good price. Even if the economy were to slow, there was Apple, which you know would still be crushing it….”

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“United Airlines (UAL) is keeping the Boeing 787 Dreamliner on the ground at least until May 12.

Investigators are still trying to figure out what caused a battery fire and another battery problem last month.

“We are taking the 787 out of our schedule through June 5, except for Denver-Narita, which will tentatively launch on May 12,” said a United spokesperson in a statement on Thursday…..”

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“After a few weeks of rumors, Google justannounced the latest device in its Chromebook lineup: the Chromebook Pixel. Unlike previous Chromebook versions, the Pixel is aimed at power users who fully live in the cloud. The device features an impressive array of hardware specs. It has a 12.85 inch high-density 2560×1700 screen (that’s 4.3 million pixels) with a 3:2 aspect ratio, an Intel Core i5 processor and a whopping 1 terabyte of free storage on Google Drive for three years.

Google will also soon launch a version with a built-in LTE radio and has partnered with Verizon to offer 100 MB/month for two years of mobile broadband and with GoGo to offer 12 free in-flight Wi-Fi sessions.

The Pixel’s screen, which is obviously the highlight of the device, features a pixel density of 239 pixels per inch. That’s a bit higher than the 220 pixels/inch on the Macbook Pro with a Retina display, so Google proudly notes that its laptop “has the highest pixel density of any laptop display.”

The basic Wi-Fi version of the Pixel will retail for $1,299 in the U.S. and £1,049 in the U.K. The Pixel is now available on Google Play and will also be available at select Best Buy locations in the U.S. andCurrys PC World in the U.K. tomorrow. The LTE version ($1,449) will ship in the U.S. in April. The other difference between the LTE and Wi-Fi models is that the LTE version will ship with a 64GB solid-state drive and the Wi-Fi version will only have 32GB….”

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“Insider Sales of Stock Hit 2 Year High as Retail Sheep are Fooled Once Again

For a while there it was looking as if the market might actually make its high and move lower before Wall Street and corporate insiders were able to hand the bag over to the suckers in retail.  It looks like that was just wishful thinking, as new stats show the retail sheep taking stock from the oligarchs at the highs as usual.  I guess the more things change the more they stay the same.  From Bloomberg:

Corporate executives are taking advantage of near-record U.S. stock prices by selling shares in their companies at the fastest pace in two years.

 

There were about 12 stock-sale announcements over the past three months for every purchase by insiders at Standard & Poor’s 500 Index (SPX) companies, the highest ratio since January 2011, according to data compiled by Bloomberg and Pavilion Global Markets. Whenever the ratio exceeded 11 in the past, the benchmark index declined 5.9 percent on average in the next six months, according to Pavilion, a Montreal-based trading firm…..”

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“(Reuters) – When former Wells Fargo & Co Chief Executive Dick Kovacevich joined Norwest Bank in 1986, he had reservations about its private equity investments as he did not think it was the kind of business a bank needed to be in. He got over it.

“I was skeptical, met with the people and became convinced that they absolutely knew what they were doing and that this was a business we could manage and do well,” said Kovacevich, who became CEO of Wells Fargo when it merged with Norwest in 1998, and retired as chairman of the fourth-largest U.S. bank in 2009.

U.S. lawmakers shared Kovacevich’s skepticism about private equity when they crafted the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill in 2010. In a section of the law known as the “Volcker Rule,” they blocked banks from making big bets with their capital, including sizable investments in private equity funds, fearing taxpayers would be left on the hook when wagers soured.

The fine print of the Volcker Rule – named for former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker – is expected to be finalized as soon as this year. Major banks such as Bank of America Corp and Citigroup Inc are already pulling back from private equity investments ahead of the rules.

But Wells Fargo is taking a different path. The bank invests in buyouts and venture capital deals largely on its own, with capital only from Wells Fargo itself and some employees. By avoiding equity from outside investors, the bank is considered to be engaging in “merchant banking,” an activity that is likely to be exempt under the Volcker Rule, lawyers and people familiar with the matter said.

Wells Fargo’s private equity investments show how even button-down, staid banks are looking for loopholes in financial regulations as they seek to boost their profits….”

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“Sony Corp. (6758) unveiled the PlayStation 4, its first video-game console in seven years, introducing new cloud and social-media features as Chief Executive Officer Kazuo Hirai seeks to reignite sales.

Andrew House, CEO of Sony’s PlayStation unit, announced the product yesterday at an event inNew York. Consumers will be able to see what friends are playing and take over games in progress from others, and will eventually be able to stream older titles. The console will go on sale for the year-end holiday season, Sony said, without announcing prices.

The PlayStation 4 makes its debut amid an industry shift toward mobile play on smartphones and tablets, raising the question of whether gamers will shell out several hundred dollars for a new device. The console will allow self- publishing, mimicking the open architecture of smartphones that encourages smaller developers to create titles for the growing ranks of casual players. Sony fell as much as 2.1 percent.

“This enhanced PlayStation experience is simply not revolutionary to overcome big disruptions facing the industry,” Amir Anvarzadeh, a Singapore-based manager for Asia equity sales at BGC Partners Inc. (BGCP), said in an e-mail. “Sony’s heavy emphasis on the social aspect of PS4 seems a bit too ambitious to deliver on.”

Sony, Nintendo…”

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“Jamie Dimon of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. (NYSE: JPM) used to be a Teflon CEO. Now we have a shareholder action looking to split the role of chairman and chief executive for the bank. You just could not speak poorly of him as he was the one American CEO of all the banking giants during the meltdown and Great Recession that could keep claiming that his bank and his depositors were safe. That was all before the London Whale trade scandal of 2012.

While that London Whale trading issue was a serious flaw and a serious mistake, the reality is that it was nowhere close to being anything more than a charge against earnings. It caused trading losses but did not cause the bank to get into counter-party trouble, nor did it trigger any “real” regulatory bank financial ratio concerns. That being said, this was a media fiasco that Dimon effectively lost a lot of his credibility.

J.P. Morgan Chase is the largest of the money center banks by market cap, barely over Wells Fargo & Co. (NYSE: WFC), but it dwarfs Wells Fargo on a total asset basis. We have received email communications from a group with $820 million in combined J.P. Morgan shares calling for stronger and more independent governance and oversight of the largest bank in America. This will be a proxy fight. Here is the report….”

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Google has released some pics and reviews of their computer glasses….

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Apple was down 2%, but seems to be paring losses only down 0.9%…

“Chinese iPhone-maker Foxconn is putting a hold on hiring and cutting production of the iPhone 5, the Financial Times reports.

Foxconn is China’s largest private sector employer.

There are all kinds of reasons this could be happening.

Some possibilities…”

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“Boeing (BA) shipped 50 of its roughly half-a-million pound, $207 million retail-price 787 Dreamliners to airlines. But since January 16th, they’ve been grounded thanks to lithium-ion batteries that burned up at a much faster rate than expected. For example, there was a fire on board a parked plane at Boston’s Logan airport and an in-flight problem on another jet in Japan.

But Boeing is keeping the 787 production lines running — and the grounded planes are taking up space on nearby runways.

Meanwhile two reports have surfaced about possible fixes for the 787 battery problems. If MIT professor, Donald R. Sadoway, is right, those reported fixes are at best partial solutions.

The New York Times reports that Boeing is producing a Dreamliner a week at its production facilities in Everett, Wash. and Charleston, S.C.. But since the 787 is grounded, those planes are piling up. The Times quotes aviation magazine editor, Mary Kirby, who drove by Paine Field in Everett during the second week of February and was shocked to see: “Parked Boeing 787s are everywhere.” …”

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“BHP Billiton Ltd., the world’s biggest mining company, named copper unit head Andrew Mackenzie as chief executive officer to succeed Marius Kloppers, who failed to deliver on about $200 billion of potential takeovers.

Mackenzie, 56, will take over on May 10, the Melbourne- based company said today in a statement when reporting a 58 percent decline in first-half profit. Under Kloppers, who became CEO in 2007, the aborted or rejected deals included hostile bids for Rio Tinto Group and Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan Inc.

Kloppers, 50, is the third head of a global mining company to step down since October as producers struggle with project writedowns, escalating costs and the aftermath of failed deals. The appointment of Mackenzie, a former 22-year veteran of BP Plc who speaks five languages and joined BHP from Rio Tinto Group in 2007, won’t change BHP’s strategy, Chairman Jac Nasser said today at a media conference in Sydney.

“Mackenzie is pretty well regarded, quite an experienced executive, but perhaps he’s going to be a little bit more focused on running the operations and expecting the best out of the operations, not that Marius wasn’t previously,” said Paul Xiradis, chief executive officer at fund manager Ausbil Dexia Ltd., which holds BHP stock. “That’s going to be the focus rather than expanding so it’s a new era.”

BHP slipped 2.2 percent to 2,188 pence by 9:15 a.m. in London. The shares fell 0.9 percent to A$38.65 at the close of trading in Sydney, trimming the gain for the past six months to 17 percent. Rio Tinto lost 1.6 percent in Sydney today and Fortescue Metals Group Ltd. declined 5 percent.

Petroleum ‘Fundamental’…”

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“Rio Tinto Group’s foray into Mozambique, which cost the world’s No. 2 mining company $3 billion, has highlighted a lack of rail and port capacity that threatens to check a coal boom in the southeast African nation.

Rio bought coal producer Riversdale Mining Ltd. for A$3.9 billion ($4 billion) in 2011 to access some of the world’s best untapped coking coal, in the Moatize basin in Mozambique’s northwest Tete province. Now Rio is writing the value down by 70 percent and a person familiar with the matter says the London- based company is considering selling them.

While finding coal in Mozambique has been a cinch, exporting it hasn’t. Rio’s plans have been stymied by the government’s refusal to allow it to barge coal down the Zambezi River and by the cost of accessing or building rail lines to a port on the east coast. The bottlenecks may scupper Mozambique’s bid to become one of the world’s top five coking coal producers and expand a mining industry that currently accounts for less than 5 percent of gross domestic product.

“We see a lot of problems now with the big players who are putting big money into Mozambique,” Peter Major, head of mining at Cape Town-based Cadiz Corporate Solutions, said in a Feb. 6 interview. “There are stockpiles of coal and they can’t get it onto trains. Even if the trains get the coal to the port, the port can’t handle it.”

Mozambique, which began commercial coal production in 2010, boosted output to about 5 million metric tons last year from 600,000 tons in 2011, according to the International Monetary Fund. About 280 million tons of coking coal, used in steelmaking, are traded annually on the seaborne market.

Top Exporter….”

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“Google Inc. has been developing plans to launch retail stores in the U.S., said people familiar with the matter, in another sign the company is studying Apple Inc.’s playbook for building a consumer-electronics brand.

The stores would likely sell Google-branded hardware, these people said. But it isn’t clear when or where any stores would open, and one of the people said the Internet giant might not move forward with the plan this year.

Apple’s stores have been a big factor in the success of the company’s iPhones and iPads, and Microsoft Corp. has also opened its own retail outlets. Inside Google, the idea of opening retail stores has long been debated as the company has become a major player in mobile devices, said people familiar with the discussions.

Google’s interest in retail stores was reported earlier by the 9to5 blog network.

Such a move may represent a change of heart in the two years since Google co-founder Larry Page became the company’s chief executive. Following Google’s short-lived attempt in 2010 to bypass brick-and-mortar stores to sell the Nexus One smartphone via its website, Mr. Page didn’t express much interest in opening retail stores whenever the possibility was discussed, said a person with knowledge of the matter.

Yet Google’s expansion beyond Web services and software into mobile hardware makes a move into retail seem more logical….”

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“The union for Boeing’s engineers and technical workers is counting ballots Tuesday on a contract offer and whether to authorize a strike.

The union, Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace, is recommending that members reject the offer because it would not provide pensions to new employees. They would have a 401k retirement plan instead. The union calls that unacceptable….”

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UBS, CBI, MDR, KBR, FWLT, FLR, ACM, TPC,

“It has been estimated that $2.75 trillion will need to be invested in America’s aging infrastructure by 2020 to get our crumbling roads, bridges, highways, water systems and power grids back up to par. We have already offered up our own list of 11 companies that will win from the infrastructure rebuild. Now we have found a new list of infrastructure winners, and the overlap is minimal.

Many politicians in Washington, D.C., have howled over the lack of infrastructure spending, despite almost $1 trillion in stimulus being thrown at the economy since the Great Recession started in 2008. Did the president finally hint in last week’s State of the Union speech that long-awaited funding may be headed to infrastructure repair soon? Despite political posturing, both parties concede that infrastructure spending is a necessity.

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“Humana Inc. (NYSE: HUM) is leading the large health insurance providers lower as the week gets off to a start. The news hit going into the weekend that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Ruling has been announced for preliminary 2014 Medicare Advantage benchmark payment rates. The long and short of the matter is that Humana sees a mid-single-digit decline in its benchmark monthly rate.

While shares are being hit hard this morning, investors should know that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has invited public comment on these preliminary rates before releasing final rates on April 1, 2013. This is the equivalent of an appeal period in a legal case, although that appeal period also can be commented on by noninsurance parties as well.

The SEC filing on Tuesday said:

In the Company’s earnings release call for the fourth quarter of 2012 held on February 4, 2013, management expressed confidence in the Company’s ability to grow both Medicare membership and earnings for 2014, based upon management’s stated expectation that the base Medicare Advantage payment rate would be flat to slightly down. The Company believes the preliminary base rates included in the CMS notice would result in a mid-single-digit decline in its benchmark payment rates (excluding the impact of the industry premium tax, county rebasing and risk factor recalibration – which are anticipated to be discussed in the final rate notice). Therefore, Humana is closely analyzing all operational avenues available to address those preliminary rates and the related impact upon the Company’s ability to grow both its Medicare membership and its earnings for 2014….”

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“SAN FRANCISCOMicrosoft (MSFT) is so confident it has the Internet’s best email service that it is about to spend at least $30 million to send its message across the U.S.

The barrage begins Tuesday when Microsoft’s twist on email, Outlook.com, escalates an assault on rival services from Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., AOL Inc. and a long list of Internet service providers.

As part of the process, all users of Microsoft’s Hotmail and other email services operating under different domains such as MSN.com will be automatically converted to Outlook.com by the summer, if they don’t voluntarily switch before then. All the old messages, contacts and settings in the old inboxes will be exported to Outlook.com. Users will also be able to keep their old addresses.

Email remains a key battleground, even at a time when more people are texting each other on phones.

People still regularly check their inboxes, albeit increasingly on their smartphones. The recurring email habit provides Internet companies a way to keep people coming back to websites. It gives people a reason to log in during their visits so it’s easier for email providers to track their activities. Frequent visits and personal identification are two of the keys to selling ads, the main way most websites make money.

That’s why Microsoft, Google and Yahoo have been retooling their email services in recent months….”

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Shares of Google have hit 53 week highs over $800 per share.

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