• Earnings Preview: Home Depot
    Posted by on November 13th, 2006 at 1:48 pm

    From AP:

    OVERVIEW: As the housing market cools off, home-improvement companies are suffering as well. Falling lumber prices have cut into revenue, and several suppliers have reported lower results and outlooks recently, including Home Depot’s largest supplier, Masco Corp.
    In an effort to improve performance, Home Depot in October said it is putting chief executive Bob Nardelli in closer contact with top leaders throughout the company, with the four division presidents in the U.S. and Mexico reporting directly to him.
    Chief Financial Officer Carol Tome also took responsibility for supporting store operations, including asset protection and customer service initiatives.
    Home Depot is also reviewing Nardelli’s compensation in light of a sagging stock price.
    In September, the company said it would hire 1,000 new employees across the country, part of a plan to invest $350 million in its stores during the second half of the year. In August Home Depot cut 300 jobs at its headquarters in Atlanta as part of the plan.
    BY THE NUMBERS: Analysts are looking for a profit of 75 cents per share on revenue of $23.39 billion, according to a Thomson Financial poll.
    ANALYST TAKE: Credit Suisse analyst Gary Balter, who rates shares of Home Depot “Neutral,” forecast earnings of 74 cents per share and expects investors to pay as much attention to whether Home Depot meets expectations as how it get there and where it’s going.
    “Meeting expectations on cost cuts and share repurchases will not satisfy investors, in our view,” Balter wrote in a note on Monday.
    He expects Home Depot to lower its 2007 earnings growth guidance of 10 percent, or $3. “Should they move closer to our level of $2.90 vs. consensus of $2.95, that could pressure shares,” Balter wrote. “More important are comments on how protracted the slowdown will be.”
    Danielle Fox of Merrill Lynch, who rates Home Depot’s stock as a “Buy,” expects earnings in line with consensus.
    “Existing home sales slowed in the relevant six-month prior period, commodity prices are down, and the company is lapping last year’s 37 basis point comps lift from hurricanes,” she wrote in a Nov. 6 analyst note. “We expect the revenue contribution from Home Depot Supply, cost controls, and accretive share repurchases to drive modest growth this quarter as the company reinvests in store labor to improve service levels.”

  • Blogging Silicon Valley
    Posted by on November 13th, 2006 at 11:13 am

    Bambi Francisco writes that Gawker founder, Nick Denton, will temporarily take over reporting duties at ValleyWag, his Silicon Valley gossip site. He said that he wants to bring in more business gossip instead of just personal gossip.

    He tells me that he has a juicy scoop about John Battelle’s Federated Media advertising network losing a major client. The loss is a “slap in the face” to Battelle, says Denton, who self-funded Gawker Media, which was launched in 2002.
    Denton hopes to triple the traffic at ValleyWag, which he said was getting an average of 20,000 or so daily pageviews. He doesn’t plan on changing the tone too much, just mixing in financial news gossip with tabloid gossip. “We’ll still publish the scoop on Larry Page’s inhouse dating, or Eric Schmidt’s long-time adultery,” he said, via AOL’s IM. I asked Denton why publishing lies about Schmidt added any value or was worth reporting on. His response: “What lies about Schmidt?” he askded. “There are a host of open secrets in Silicon Valley — which all the insiders know, and gossip about. Valleywag’s role is to reflect that conversation, and open it up to the wider world.”

    Battelle responds:

    If Nick truly intends to step it up over at Valleywag by improving its financial and business reporting, I am sure he will exercise a long held journalistic skill: understanding the business model of the subjects he’s writing about before presuming to judge them, and contacting us for comment before publishing rumor or speculation.

    Oooh burn.

  • Dell Creeps Higher
    Posted by on November 13th, 2006 at 10:36 am

    Dell‘s (DELL) earnings report is due on Thursday. The stock has gradually been creeping higher. Today the shares reached a five-month high. Does the market know something? It’s hard to say, but at least we haven’t had an earnings warning yet. The Street is expecting earnings of 24 cents a share, although no analyst is willing to go higher than 26 cents a share. This will be interesting to see.

  • My Favorite YouTube Spots
    Posted by on November 11th, 2006 at 5:11 pm

    Since you probably have too much free time on your hands, I’d thought I’d share with you some of my favorite You Tube videos.
    Miles Davis & John Coltrane
    Hendrix at Woodstock
    Carson/Dragnet Skit
    The Little Lebowski
    Bunnies Doing Jaws
    The Brady Bunch Variety Hour
    Johnny Cash 1959
    Grateful Dead on Playboy After Dark
    Goal for Scotland
    Groucho at His Best
    Frances Gumm

  • Cyrus McCormick
    Posted by on November 11th, 2006 at 6:51 am

    Did you ever wonder how a third-world country became the world’s largest economy? The answer is easy: people like Cyrus McCormick.

  • The Way, Way Back Crowd
    Posted by on November 10th, 2006 at 1:47 pm

    Jack Ciesielski, who runs the terrific AAO Blog, notes the growing use of non-reliance 8-Ks. These are federal filings that tell shareholders that all the previous filings were sort of…wrong. The latest member of what Jack calls the “way, way back crowd” is Peet’s Coffee & Tea (PEET). The funny things about Peet’s is that they’re restating everything back to 1996, five years before they went public.

  • This Just In
    Posted by on November 10th, 2006 at 1:42 pm

    Greenspan Not Omniscient

  • Google and Price Targets
    Posted by on November 10th, 2006 at 11:28 am

    At the beginning of the year, Safa Rashtchy of Piper Jaffray put a $600 price target on shares of Google (GOOG). The stock responded by shooting up $21 to $435. Some of us were tempted to laugh. Actually, we gave into our temptation and laughed quite a lot. Two days later Mark Stahlman at Caris & Co. put a $2,000 price target on Google. This nearly killed us.
    As you would expect, the stock immediately plummeted below $340, and stayed below its high for much of the year. But recently, the search engine has caught fire again. In later-October, the stock got all the way up to $492, and now it’s settled in the $470ish range.
    Google is going for about 35 times earnings, and if you follow the PEG ratio stuff (which I don’t), then the shares are just about in line with the projected growth rate of 32.5%. Well, Google could be a good buy at some point, but I’d like to see the shares fall back down again before making a move. I’m guessing the path $2,000 will be harder than the path to $450.

  • Is a Burrito a Sandwich?
    Posted by on November 10th, 2006 at 9:46 am

    woscourt2.jpg
    No, says a judge.

    In issuing his decision, which blocks Panera Bread’s attempts to keep the burrito maker off its turf, Worcester Superior Court Judge Jeffrey A. Locke relied on testimony from Cambridge chef Chris Schlesinger and a former high-ranking USDA official, not to mention the Webster’s Third New International Dictionary.
    The burrito brouhaha began when Panera, one of the country’s biggest bakery cafes, argued that owners of the White City Shopping Center in Shrewsbury violated a 2001 lease agreement that restricted the mall from renting to another sandwich shop. When the center signed a lease this year with Qdoba, Panera balked, saying the Mexican chain’s burritos violate its sandwich exclusivity clause.

    At the beginning of the year, I said that Panera (PNRA) was overpriced (so are its not-burritos). I was right. The stocks needs to come down some more.

  • The First Islamic Bourse
    Posted by on November 10th, 2006 at 6:34 am

    The Financial Times reports that Dubai has created the world’s first Islamic bourse:

    The more established Dubai Financial Market (DFM) said this week it was restructuring itself to comply with Islamic financial principals. The move comes days before it launches a $435m (€340m, £230m) initial public offering.
    Many investors in Dubai believe the conversion is primarily a marketing exercise. Islamic principals only exclude companies whose main business is pork, alcohol, arms, tobacco or interest, and state-owned DFM has never fallen into these categories. Furthermore, DFM will continue to list conventional banks after its conversion, with fees from banking stocks paid into a separate pool.
    The chief motive, analysts say, is that the main Dubai share index has fallen from a peak of 1,267 points a year ago to 379 points yesterday.

    Sounds like they’re playing to their base.