Well that's what I meant by if they don't drop the ball completely. They have a better vision of the future of tablets. I'm sure they'll have some bugs to work out but at a minimum they should cut into the android market pretty easily.
Can't say I blame you for not buying in now. I've already got a position and think it's still got more room to run, so I'm not taking any money off the table just quite yet. But at these prices the decision to hold is a of a lot easier than the decision to buy. I'm certainly not putting any new money into it right now.
Microsoft is a good bet. I don't own any since I'm pretty tech-heavy with other holdings right now, but I like what they're doing.
Speaking of Apple...
Apple announces dividend and buyback
bipartisan enabling, but pushed hard and falsely by Repugs, of IPO fraud and removal of investor protections:
Fiscal Affairs: A Colossal Mistake of Historic Proportions: The "JOBS" Bill
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/simon-...comm_ref=false
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...767489216.htmlThe Justice Department has warned Apple Inc. AAPL +1.89% and five of the biggest U.S. publishers that it plans to sue them for allegedly colluding to raise the price of electronic books, according to people familiar with the matter.
Apple CEO Tim Cook speaks during Wednesday's iPad product launch.
Several of the parties have held talks to settle the an rust case and head off a potentially damaging court battle, these people said. If successful, such a settlement could have wide-ranging repercussions for the industry, potentially leading to cheaper e-books for consumers. However, not every publisher is in settlement discussions.
The five publishers facing a potential suit are CBS Corp.'s CBS +1.12% Simon & Schuster Inc.; Lagardere SCA's Hachette Book Group; Pearson PSO +0.57% PLC's Penguin Group (USA); Macmillan, a unit of Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck GmbH; and HarperCollins Publishers Inc., a unit of News Corp., NWSA +1.40% which also owns The Wall Street Journal.
There may be more pain coming, but I just saw that bank of America is trading at 50% book value! It may be worth another look if your time horizon is long. Oh BTW, Wells is at 1.4 times book and jpm is at .96 book.
All I know is so far I have a 38% unrealized return for Citi. Im gonna place a sell stop at about 34 to protect some of the gain cause I can still see 50 in the near future
Well there is an old adage that claims to but a bank at half book and sell at double book. Firms aren't usually valued on there book value so saying JPM only needs slight calibration isn't exactly right either. Fwiw citi was at .63 or so. Full disclosure I bought some Jan 13 calls for a 17.50 strike when boa was still in the 7s. I don't expect it to get that high that quickly, but I wanted to go on a little ride up and passing the stress tests really helped. I will probably hold until the next earnings date to see if they try to increase their dividend again.
“If the Federal Reserve is seeking to drive banks out of the private sector and into the government-lending business, they are doing an excellent job”
Pensions Find Riskier Funds Fail to Pay Off
Consider the contrast between the state retirement fund for Pennsylvania and the one for Georgia.
The $26.3 billion Pennsylvania State Employees' Retirement System has more than 46 percent of its assets in riskier alternatives, including nearly 400 private equity, venture capital and real estate funds.
The system paid about $1.35 billion in management fees in the last five years and reported a five-year annualized return of 3.6 percent. That is below the 8 percent target needed to meet its financing requirements, and it also lags behind a 4.9 percent median return among public pension systems.
In Georgia, the $14.4 billion retirement system, which is prohibited by state law from investing in alternative investments, has earned 5.3 percent annually over the same time frame and paid about $54 million total in fees. The two funds represent the extremes, with Pennsylvania in a group of pension systems with some of the highest percentages of investments in alternatives and Georgia in a group of 10 with some of the lowest, according to groupings of funds identified by the London-based research firm Preqin.
An analysis of the sampling presents an unflattering portrait of the riskier bets: the funds with a third to more than half of their money in private equity, hedge funds and real estate had returns that were more than a percentage point lower than returns of the funds that largely avoided those assets. They also paid nearly four times as much in fees.
While managers for the retirement systems say that a five-year period is not long enough to judge their success, those fees nevertheless add up to hundreds of millions of dollars each year for some of the country's largest pension funds. The $51.4 billion Pennsylvania public schools pension system, for instance, which has 46 percent of its assets in riskier investments, pays more than $500 million a year in fees. It has earned 3.9 percent annually since 2007.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/article;js...?a=933646&f=19
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Wall st sucking down Human-Americans' retirement funds with fees charged, win or lose.
JP Morgan and Wells Fargo kicked off earnings season for financial services. They have good quarterly results but their stock prices are down, which means....
Pper pr
JPMorgan Chase
Only 7%? They've bounced back.
That trader in London is dead. JPMorgan will be stupid to sack his fat ass. No company is ever going to think of hiring him again. He should just tend to cows in the pasture.
How'd you like to make that call? "Um, boss, yeah, I uh...............lost $2 billion dollars."
"that's ok, kid, I'm sure our lawyers can crawl up your ass and help you find it"
Remember, this isn't the only multi-billion dollar loss suffered by a large bank:
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/BUSINESS...ost/index.html
Facebook IPO is Friday. Anyone going to try and touch that one?
Personally, I'm staying on the sidelines but am curious what others think.
Are they going up on NYSE Euronext or NASDAQ OMX?
nasdaq
saw that. have small investors fled the stock exchanges yet?
if not, it might be advisable to do so. QT is outta hand.
On Wall Street, the Rising Cost of Faster Trades
For several years, the Wall Street wizards who built a faster, more fragmented stock market justified their creation by pointing to the benefits it yielded for investors in the form of lower trading costs.
But as the speed and complexity of the markets have continued to change at a rapid pace - with trade times now measured in millionths of a second - a growing number of studies and market participants suggest that those benefits to investors have stalled or even started to reverse.
Research from the broker Abel/Noser indicates that the total cost for an investor to get into and out of a single share of stock fell by more than half between 2000 and 2010, to 3.5 cents. Since then, though, the cost has leveled off and then ticked up in the most recent quarter to 3.8 cents, confirming a trend that has also been visible in recent data from Credit Suisse Trading Strategy and from Celent, a consulting firm specializing in financial markets.
The advantages of the nation's increasingly high-speed stock market are under the microscope after a number of recent trading malfunctions underscored the risks and instability that have come with the rapid changes. This month, one of Wall Street's most important trading firms, Knight Capital, lost $440 million in 45 minutes after installing faulty software designed to keep up with an evolving market.
As the battle to introduce more sophisticated technology continues, raising the specter of more problems like Knight's, the diminishing returns flowing back to investors are making even longtime proponents of innovation question whether the compe ion to make the market faster and more efficient is now doing more harm than good.
"They've reached the point where the compe ion is measured in microseconds and there are essentially no benefits to the public at that level," said Lawrence E. Harris, the former chief economist at the Securities and Exchange Commission, and now a professor at the University of Southern California.
High-speed trading firms have thrived in the computerized markets and now account for more than half of all stock trading, up from 26 percent in 2006, according to the Tabb Group, a financial markets research firm. But even many of them acknowledge that they are engaged in an arms race that is delivering diminishing returns.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/article?a=960083&f=19
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