Facebook Earnings Leave Nothing to be Desired There's no two ways about it… Facebook (FB) is a money-making monster, and is well-positioned to remain a monster indefinitely (as far as that term can be used with the technology sector). The social networking company posted results this week that simply blew away estimates, and left its year-ago numbers in the dust....
Apple Is Still Great, But Clearly Not Infallible Whether or not Apple (AAPL) did well or did poorly last quarter is largely a matter of perspective. Its earnings rolled in higher than anticipated, but revenue fell short of analysts' estimates. Perhaps more important, sales of iPhones and iPads came up short of estimates, sending the stock down roughly 6% on...
Home Sales, Home Prices Continue to Say Real Estate Market is Strong Any brewing concerns that the U.S. housing market is headed over a cliff were at least partially wiped away on the heels of a spectacular New Home Sales report this week. All told, new houses sold at an annualized pace of 544,000 units in December. That's second only to...
Existing Home Sales Rebound, and Could Have Been Even Better If… Last month, when November's pace of existing home sales fell to a multi-year low of 4.76 million, investors were understandably worried a brewing collapse in the housing market was a sign of an economic recession, which in turn would lead to a bear market for stocks. Those worries were...
Housing Starts & Building Permits Better Than Headlines Imply Yes, December's housing starts and building permits were down… from November's annualized pace. There's a proverbial "rest of the story" though. That is, November's permits were impressively and abnormally strong, and November's starts weren't too shabby either. And, both data sets remain in long-term uptrends. The specifics: The annualized pace of...
William O'Neil's CANSLIM Method The CANSLIM approach to stock-picking was developed by William J. O’Neil, the founder of market-oriented publication Investors Business Daily. Designed primarily to find undervalued growth stocks, this multi-faceted strategy is simply the strict use of seven criteria; "CANSLIM" is an acronym for those seven rules. C: Current earnings performance. Is the company in question doing well...
The Basics Of Bollinger Bands Bollinger Bands are a technical analysis tool that envelop a chart of a stock or an index as a means of defining a plausible volatility boundary for the instrument in question. Plotted above and below the chart of the index or stock in question, Bollinger Bands are more responsive than a moving average envelope, but...
Q4 Earnings Season Outlook It's here again… earnings season. Alcoa (AA) kicked things off on Monday evening, posting mixed results. That is, the per-share income of four cents it earned topped estimates of two cents per share, though last quarter's revenue of $5.25 billion fell roughly $40 million short of expectations. Regardless of Alcoa's numbers, the advent of earnings season...
Unemployment Rate May Have Bottomed, But Job Growth is Still in the Cards Last month's job growth wasn't enough to push the official unemployment rate any lower than the reading of 5.0% it's been hovering at since October, but the 292,000 new jobs added in December was the second best month all year (and second only to the 307,000 newly-created...
U.S. Service Industries Confidence, Job Growth Differs from U.S. Manufacturing Business Call it a tale of two cities. Service-related business in the United States are doing well, and the nation's businesses know it. Conversely, factories are struggling, and the nation knows that too. Both sides of that coin will need to do well if the economy — and the stock...
