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    • On Wall Street, much is made over the difference between leading and lagging indicators, but investors of all sizes are clearly prefer the former. It's part of the reason why this morning's weaker than expected first quarter GDP report was a disappointment, but not enough to send traders rushing for the exits.

      ''I think what it indicates is that the economy is sort of muddling along," says Martin Leclerc, managing partner at Barrack Yard Advisors, of the 2.5% growth figure for the first three months of the year. "It (GDP data) can create a buying opportunity or a selling opportunity, but what happens with the real economy sometimes doesn't translate into what happens with asset prices."

      And since this is only the first of what will likely be three very different readings of the same data point, it makes it even easier for investors to get over it, so to speak, and stay the course. That's because the general idea that the economy is slowly improving from Q4's dreadful 0.4% pace, is still intact.

      For Leclerc, a value investor who shops globally, the weakness in exports confirms a well established fact that things are soft overseas. But that's not always a bad thing, he says, when you're job is to find good companies at great prices.

      Read More »from Q1 GDP Rebounds Less Than Economists Expected
    • In the dead of winter, three long months ago, the buzz on Wall Street was about the great rotation. This budding super-trend was not only calling for a massive movement of money out of bonds and into stocks, but was also being used as a crutch to justify otherwise inexplicable gains in the market.

      Today, there's another rotation underway, only this time the money flow is moving out of defensive sectors and into cyclicals and other industry groups that have been lagging. It's a sudden shift in sentiment that Miller Tabak's Jonathan Krinsky calls, "the other great rotation," and a trend that could prove to be just what's needed to drive stocks to fresh highs.

      And according to Peter Kenny, managing director at Knight Capital, as much as earnings season has been "lumpy and uneven with extremes on both ends," it is also fueling the movement of money.

      "Earnings and guidance are helping that rotation out of the defensives and into the more risk-oriented or growth-oriented or alpha-oriented issues, and away from the Dow 30," he says in the attached video. He notes even small and mid-cap stocks are beating the Dow Industrials now too.

      Read More »from Earnings and Risk Rotation Could Fuel the Rally
    • There’s nothing like fresh produce straight from the farm. Green markets are popping up all over the country to meet growing demand for high quality food. But if you don’t have the time or the patience, you certainly have options. FreshDirect is one of the largest online grocers that’s been clicking with consumers seeking quality.

      Grocery delivery services aren’t new; they’ve existed as long as the stores themselves. While overall grocery store sales in the U.S. fell 2.1% last year, online grocer sales jumped over 8%, according to IBISWorld. Further, they estimate online sales to grow 9.5% annually into a $9.4 billion industry by 2017.

      The largest is Peapod, a service that delivers goods specifically from grocery store chains Stop & Shop and Giant Foods. The company started in Illinois in 1989 and now covers 24 markets in 13 states. FreshDirect is the new kid on the block, started in New York in 2002.

      Breakout sat down with the co-founders, Jason Ackerman and David McInerney, to digest exactly what sets FreshDirect apart.

      “Forget the Internet for a moment, look at a Stop & Shop and Whole Foods (WFM),” says Ackerman, who also serves as CEO. “You’d be able to articulate that they’re very different stores. It’s the same thing. We are about really the best fresh food on the marketplace and that’s what makes us different.”

      The company travels around the globe looking for the freshest meat, seafood, and produce. Unlike competitor Peapod, they’re not tied to any specific grocer. They believe this enables the service to be faster and fresher.

      “Take strawberries. Those strawberries are bred and grown to have a three week shelf life,” explains McInerney, “to accommodate retailers that need to move them around and around and around until ultimately they end up at a consumers house. Our model takes out a lot of the distribution because we’re buying it directly from the farm. We can take entire truckloads from the farm into us, often pre-selling it before it even arrives in our facility because we take orders seven days out.”

      FreshDirect told us exclusively about plans to take that freshness to a whole new level. The company will relocate from its Long Island City headquarters in Queens, to the Bronx, New York, where they’ll have a brand new facility and products that are ripe for the picking.

      Read More »from FreshDirect Building 200,000 Sq. Ft. Greenhouse in South Bronx
    • For those of you looking for a reason to get excited about the first quarter GDP report due out Friday morning, perhaps nostalgia may be just the hook you need. That's because it will mark the final economic measurement done before the government's Bureau of Economic Analysis rolls out newly calculated data in July.

      "People just take the GDP number and run with it, without really looking into the details," says Peter Kenny, managing director at Knight Capital in the attached video. "It is a very complex number."

      Officially, Kenny and other market watchers and economists are looking for tomorrow's report to show GDP recovering to 2.8% in the first three months of the year, from what he refers to as "stole mode" in the fourth quarter amidst election and fiscal cliff worries.

      "If you look at the markets and broader indexes, they're really pricing in some fairly significant earnings power and guidance," he says of the anticipated uptick in activity.

      This self-described ''old school" analyst finds the whole thing a bit Orwellian and conspiratorial. Thanks to the inclusion of the value of such ''intangibles" as intellectual property, research and development, and the creativity of artists and scientists, our economy will magically be 3%, or about $450 billion larger, when the next numbers come out in July.

      Read More »from Bracing for the Great GDP Data Shift, Like It or Not

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