Archives for April 2013

April 2013 - Page 17 of 21 - Money Morning - Only the News You Can Profit From

Buy, Sell or Hold: What's So "Special" About Kellogg?

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Everybody knows Kellogg Company (NYSE: K) by its superb line of breakfast cereals.

What they don't know is that thanks to the purchase of Pringles from Procter & Gamble (NYSE: PG) , Kellogg has become second in the snacks business behind PepsiCo (NYSE: PEP).

In fact, since Kellogg completed the $2.7 billion Pringle acquisition on June 1, 2012 the company's share price has increased over 30% with nary a pause.

Now I realize that eating just one Pringles potato chip is impossible, but does that justify the market's appetite for Kellogg's shares?

Here's my breakdown on the stock…

A New Blueprint for Retirement Savings

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Last week we looked at how the 4% rule for retirement savings was no longer useful, and has left many retirees without enough money to enjoy their golden years. But there's another reason retirement savings aren't delivering enough for us to live on after we stop working. It's not just that we aren't doing the […]

My New Favorite Way to Make Killer Income

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I'm going to tell you about my new favorite income play. They're known as Business Development Corporations, or BDCs for short.

Here's the story on BDCs – there are plenty of businesses out there generating between $2.5 million and $100 million a year. The problem is, because of Washington's bailout madness and banks hoarding cash, these businesses are starved for capital, so they're turning to private financing instead.

One business I know of, for example, is making a new open source platform called Sailfish to compete with Google's Android, Apple's iOS and Microsoft's Windows 8.

At its nucleus is a team of developers initially laid off from Nokia when Sailfish's prior incarnation, MeeGo, was ash-canned two years ago.

Because bankers could not get their minds around the concept of taking on the big boys, Sailfish is being bankrolled by a combination of severance pay, government business loans, and private financing to the tune of $13.5 million so far — all of whom will likely rue the day they passed on a project with more than $300 million in potential.

The First Rule for Picking Winners in High-Tech Stocks

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Last Sunday, I told you that the road to wealth was paved by tech.

I told you there was still hope for America – and for your retirement – because of the massive profits that high-tech stocks can generate.

But the truth is it's not enough to find an interesting company in a hot tech sector.

To score the kind of life-changing profits I told you about last week, you have to invest in the truly exemplary high-tech winners.

These are the companies that are changing the rules in computers, biotechnology, industrial materials, telecommunications, aerospace, and other cutting-edge sectors.

Those paradigm-changing ventures create markets where none existed, leapfrog existing technologies, and create products that their customers never even dreamed about… but then can't live without.

TSS and COLB Arm Extend Ties - Analyst Blog

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Expanding its merchant acquiring services, Total System Services Inc. (TSS) announced the renewal of its long-term contract with the leading Washington-based Columbia State Bank. However, the details of the alliance remain undisclosed. Columbia State Bank is a wing of Columbia Banking System Inc. (COLB), operating 74 branches in Washington and 25 outlets in Oregon. In […]

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Sequestration Cuts Hit Cancer Patients While Billions Wasted

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As of April 1, cancer clinics began turning away thousands of Medicare patients because of sequestration spending cuts while the University of Iowa is using almost $900,000 of taxpayer money to study whether there is any benefit to sex among New Zealand mud snails.

It's taken about a month, but the mandated federal spending cuts of sequestration have finally started to have a real impact.

Not as dire an impact as President Barack Obama warned about in the weeks preceding the sequester, but the consequences are growing more serious every day.

But what's most galling about all this is that despite the real harm the sequestration cuts are causing, wasteful government spending has continued unabated.

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U.S. Jobs Report: How Unemployment is Really 14%

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Employers added just 88,000 jobs in March, according to the U.S. jobs report released Friday, hiring at the slowest pace since June 2012.

The number was a huge miss. Analysts expected a gain of 200,000.

"We all over shot it," Austan Goolsbee, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors in U.S. President Barack Obama's first administration, said on CNBC. "This is a punch to the gut. I mean, this is not a good number."

Since the government's way of calculating unemployment is frighteningly inaccurate, even with such a small amount of jobs added the unemployment rate fell from 7.7% to 7.6%.

That's because the labor force participation rate slipped from 63.5% to 63.3% — the lowest level since 1979.

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Rating Action on Hilltop's Arm - Analyst Blog

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Ratings agency A.M. Best Co. demoted the credit rating of National Lloyds Insurance Co. (NLIC) – a property-casualty (P&C) wing of Hilltop Holdings Inc. (HTH) – by a notch. The rating was lowered on the backdrop of weak operating performance over the past several years. Accordingly, the ratings agency downgraded the issuer credit rating (ICR) […]

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Dr. Reddy's Launches Generic Reclast - Analyst Blog

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Dr. Reddy's Laboratories Ltd. (RDY) recently announced the launch of its therapeutic equivalent generic version of Novartis AG’s (NVS) Reclast (zoledronic acid 5 mg/100 mL) Injection in the US. The launch followed the approval by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) of the company’s Abbreviated New Drug Application (ANDA) for Reclast. Reclast is once-a-year […]

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