YOUR FRIENDS' ACTIVITY

    • Lock up the dogs and hide the children. Something wicked will this way come tonight when JC Penney (JCP) allows its earnings to slither out of Dallas. Unlike many earnings reports there isn't a lot of suspense on this one: the company is going to miss and it's going to be ugly. Official estimates are for a loss of 74-cents on revenues of $2.74b compared to a 75-cent loss on $3.2 billion for the same period last year.

      How individual investors feel about the results depends entirely on their entry price. JCP stock has risen almost 25% in the last month in a knee-jerk burst of enthusiasm after the firing of former CEO Ron Johnson, an investment by the Soros group, and a $1.75 billion debt deal that ensured the retailer's survival for at least another year.

      Those are the good things. On the downside is everything else about the company. The current CEO is the guy Johnson replaced. That means, unlike new bosses who come in to "clean house," Myron "Mike" Ullman actually has a vested interest in Penney's former business model. That being the case, Wall Street's reaction to tonight's earnings report isn't about economics but vision. Specifically, how does Ullman plan to reassemble a company stuck halfway between a radical overhaul that's left stores literally in shambles.

      Brian Sozzi of Belus Capital Advisors has been sneaking around the stores taking videos lately and he doesn't like what he sees. "I'm seeing a hodge podge of strategies," frets Sozzi. The stores are an amalgamation of Johnson's hipster colors and lack of discounts coupled with Ullman's hyper-promotional brand of retailing. No one knows what to make of the stores at this point, including management.

      Read More »from Less is More: JCP Shareholders Need a HUGE Miss Tonight
    • Walmart (WMT) missed earnings estimates and guided lower for the current quarter this morning, citing currency impacts and "considerable headwinds to top line sales," in the words of CEO Mike Duke. The news comes just one day after shares of Walmart made an all-time high just under $80 a share. Walmart's stock is up more than 17% year-to-date.

      Brian Sozzi of Belus Capital Advisors says the quarter was worse than it appears. "I see a lot of disaster in the quarter," the dapper Sozzi says in the attached video. The stock's ramp up was a function of a quest for yield by investors, he says. Traffic was worse than last quarter, same store sales were negative, and the expense of feeding so many core growth opportunities is simply too much.

      Doctor Sozzi has a prescription for what's ailing the world's largest retailer: "get rid of Sam's Club... it doesn't belong in the company especially when the focus is clearly on investing online and winning internationally."

      Read More »from Too Big to Succeed – It’s Time to Break-up Walmart: Sozzi
    • Three days ago, when Dell (Dell) announced that it was going to release it first quarter earnings results five days earlier than originally planned, the street took it as a warning sign that bad news was sure to follow.

      Even before the change, it wasn't as if analysts were expecting great things from the humbled and hurting computer-maker, but the haste shown in trying to get the latest report out has not only served to take low expectations even lower, but has stoked a fresh round of speculation over founder Michael Dell's effort to privatize the company.

      As my co-host Jeff Macke and I discuss in the attached video, Dell's existence is hardly dependent upon whether it meets or beats analysts expectations or offers bullish guidance about the future. No, Dell's results are all about valuation, and the worse they look, they more likely it will be that any and all shareholders will see that the current cash bid (of $13.65 per share from Michael Dell and Silver Lake Partners) might not be as much of a steal as certain shareholders have inferred.

      "They've shopped the company and there's been a lot of umbrage, a lot of outrage, a lot of 'Michael Dell is trying to steal the company'," Macke says, pointing out that there's a ''scoreboard" that keeps track of these things everyday called the share price. "And it turns out Dell is worth about $13.65," he says.

      Read More »from Will Weak Earnings Clinch The Dell Deal For Its Founder?
    • It's frequently stated in this business that "mom & pop," or small investors, always get it wrong. They buy too late after stocks have risen, and then sell too early after a decline and end up missing the rebound. This trend is so predictably incorrect that some shops simply do the opposite and chalk up their gains to expertise.

      With that in mind, it's no surprise that it is increasingly being argued that the record-high stock indexes are doomed simply because investors appear to be belatedly gaining confidence to test the waters, so to speak.

      For Don Hays, founder of Hays Advisory Group and a 40-year veteran strategist, nothing could be further from the truth than to suggest that investors have gotten overly bullish.

      Read More »from Have Investors Become Too Bullish? Hardly, Says Hays

    Pagination

    (2,321 Stories)

    About Breakout

    Breakout is Yahoo! Finance’s daily all-out, roll-up-your-sleeves, dive-in, interactive investing show, offering fresh segments throughout the trading day. If you love making money, if you want to protect what you have, if you’re passionate about understanding these crazy markets, you’re in the right place.

    Investing 101

    Breakout Profiles

    DON'T MISS

    Subscribe and RSS

    [X]

    How to subscribe

    Roll over each section to subscribe using Add to My Yahoo! or RSS Feed feeds.

    Yahoo! News offers dozens of RSS feeds you can read in My Yahoo! or using third-party RSS news reader software. Click here to find out more about RSS and how you can use it with Yahoo! News.

    DISCLAIMER

    Merrill Lynch is not responsible for any content on this site.
     
    Recent Quotes
    Symbol Price Change % Chg 
    Your most recently viewed tickers will automatically show up here if you type a ticker in the "Enter symbol/company" at the bottom of this module.
    You need to enable your browser cookies to view your most recent quotes.
     
    Sign-in to view quotes in your portfolios.