The Inquisitive Mind

As I had anticipated the equity markets gapped down at the open today. There is strong divergence all along, with large cap tech getting a bid while energy and financials being sold off. This is the reverse of the sector rotation we were seeing last week.
Market Internals Diverge
The market breadth is negative on the NYSE [...]

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The equity markets had an inside day today. Most indices traded well in the upper end of yesterday’s range. The SPX formed a double bottom at the 897 level and closed strong.
However as I write this post the S&P futures are down 11 points. It seems this was a result of a news item that [...]

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The economic downturn has forced American consumers to scale back their appetite for big-tickets items. . Large homes, new luxury cars, expensive vacations in exotic locales are no longer in vogue. This is not only due to a reduce ability to spend because of significantly lower availability of credit or insecurity about the job [...]

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The Yahoo!-Microsoft merger saga has taken a new twist with the revelation that the activist investor Carl Icahn has built up a major stake in Yahoo. Mr. Icahn owns about 50 million shares of Yahoo, investing more than a Billion dollars of his own money.
Proxy Fight: Complete Slate of Directors
Mr. Icahn will try to replace [...]

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Microsoft surprised no one with their unsolicited offer for Yahoo! in January 2008. What surprised some Wall Street observers was the premium Microsoft was willing to pay for Yahoo’s then share price. At that time the $31/share offer represented a 62% premium over Yahoo’s then share price of $19.18. What surprised the same observers was [...]

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The past two weeks have been full of earning report, and more significantly, earning surprises. While the stock market has been on a roller coaster ride many investors have been on the sidelines, confused by Wall Street’s reaction. Traders are making merry; buy the dips, sell the rips seems to be working really well. In [...]

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This weekend’s Barron’s has article by Jacqueline Doherty titled “Google’s Next Stop: Below 350?” The main thesis of the article is that analysts have not reduced earnings estimates for Google to account for the expected reduction in clicks and corporate ad spending. The article recommends staying clear of the stock until Wall Street recognizes that [...]

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The tech-ticker on Yahoo! Finance had an interesting article about Apple zealots posting extremely critical messages in response to an article by Barron’s Eric Savitz which highlighted negative comments by Toni Sacconaghi, a Berstien Research analyst. It got me thinking about why companies have such loyal fanboys?
Two Silicon Valley companies come to mind, Apple [...]

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Apple’s COO Tim Cook made a presentation at the Goldman Sachs Technology Investment Symposium earlier today. The call was very bullish and tore to shred all the doubts that had been raised by different analysts about Apple’s business prospects. MacDailyNews has live notes about the call.
Some highlights:
• iPhone sales target of 10 million affirmed
• [...]

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Google’s stock has been hammered over the past two weeks and Henry Blodget blog posts have been in the thick of the action. Last October when Google was on a bull run, Blodget had come out with a post about Google going to $2000. He had followed up with another post on November 27, where [...]

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