Saturday, August 18, 2018
Last week, I told you about how the tone of quarterly earnings conference calls had changed. From a focus on trumpeting the benefits to companies’ bottom lines of the corporate tax cuts Congress passed at the end of 2017, the focus had shifted to the trade war and rising costs. This is especially true with […]
While Wall Street fawns over earnings reports from market darlings such as Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL), something else caught my eye this earnings season. That is the fact that the multi-front trade battles are prompting warnings from some of the largest U.S. companies that higher tariffs will squeeze their profit margins, force them to pass on […]
Video games have certainly come a long way from the table tennis-inspired game Pong that was introduced in 1972. Today, people are actually being paid a lot of money to play computer games. Welcome to the world of e-sports where millions of fans worldwide watch professional gamers in action. There are about 300 million people […]
In recent months, it has gotten harder to separate the performance of the U.S. stock market from the performance of the FAANG stocks (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google/Alphabet). Despite Facebook’s face-plant, after its earnings announcement led to the worst one-day loss ever for any stock, the overall performance of the market year-to-date has been […]
Trade war tensions seem to have cooled for now and that’s a good thing. Why? Because the percentage of S&P 500 sales from foreign countries is substantial and has been between 43% and 48% since 2006. For technology companies, the percentage is even higher, hovering between 56% and 60% since 2010. If access to these […]
Driven by a strong economy worldwide and rising corporate confidence, global dividends in 2017 reached record levels. Payouts rose 7.7% last year – the fastest pace since 2014 – to $1.3 trillion. Domestically, payout growth in the U.S. rebounded from a sluggish 2016 when election uncertainty caused companies to hold off their investment and dividend […]
Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX) is one of those ‘belief’ stocks like Tesla. Either you believe in its business model, despite its lack profitability, or you don’t. The key tenet is this belief revolves around the growth in the company’s subscriber base. And here, the first cracks have appeared. The latest subscriber figures from Netflix were disappointing, […]
I like to look for what are called contrarian investments. That is, trades where Wall Street is piled into one side of the ‘boat’. When this happens, the ‘boat’ has a tendency to ‘capsize’ turning into very large profits for taking the opposite side of the trade that Wall Street is on. There are several […]
There has been no company like Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) ever with the ability to affect entire industries just by announcing its entry. The most recent example of this was in late June when Amazon announced a roughly $1 billion acquisition of PillPack, a mail-order pharmacy that packages pills into daily portions before shipping them to […]
Many investors continue to think of blockchain as merely the technology that Bitcoin is based on. But it is rapidly becoming a lot more than that. . . . . In this next article in my series on blockchain technology, I look at the ever-expanding uses some of the leading companies in the world are […]
