Archive for March 15th, 2008
Filed under: Bad news, KB HOME (KBH), Lennar Corp’A’ (LEN), Toll Brothers (TOL), Housing
As the financial crisis spreads quickly from Wall Street to other industries, two large home builder projects have received default notices. The problems involve developments in Las Vegas, where house prices have collapsed.
A project involving KB Homes (NYSE: KBH), Lennar (NYSE: LEN), and Toll Brothers (NYSE: TOL) has failed to make interest payments on $765 million in debt.
According to The Wall Street Journal (subscription required), the project is spear-headed by a private company, Focus Property Group.
It is not clear how many other large real estate developments involving public home builders are facing near-term margin calls, but with the falling price of real estate, the problem in Las Vegas is unlikely to be that last one. That means that already weakened firms could face a credit crisis of their own as home prices continue to drop and the potential value of homes under construction face going on the market for a fraction of what they may have brought just a year ago.
Some of the large home building company stocks have lost over two-thirds of their value over the past year, and that may only be the beginning.
Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.
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Filed under: Earnings reports, Google (GOOG), Wal-Mart (WMT), Target Corp. (TGT), NIKE, Inc’B’ (NKE), United Parcel’B’ (UPS), Jones Soda (JSDA), Texas Instruments (TXN), Liz Claiborne (LIZ)
Here are some highlights from this past week’s earnings coverage from BloggingStocks:
Continue reading Earnings highlights: Humana, Texas Instruments, UPS, Liz Clairborne, and others
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Filed under: Wal-Mart (WMT), Columns
 Welcome to the 53rd installment of The Wal-Mart Weekly, a column dedicated to bringing you insight, wit, facts, results, opinions, and just a bit of everything else when it comes down to a very hot topic these days: Wal-Mart.
In this week’s Wal-Mart Weekly, I’ll be looking at Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE: WMT) positioning in the consumer electronics category. Wal-Mart has always served customers looking for the latest television sets to iPods to home theater systems, but generally has not focused in on the ‘ministore’ concept for merchandising these products.
When visiting a local Wal-Mart Supercenter this week, I was rather stunned to find a Best Buy Inc. (NYSE: BBY) type of appearance in Wal-Mart’s consumer electronics department. In fact, the new planogram and merchandising arrangement reminded me of — Best Buy itself.
Continue reading The Wal-Mart Weekly: Electronics merchandising makes big leaps
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Filed under: Bad news, KB HOME (KBH), Lennar Corp’A’ (LEN), Toll Brothers (TOL), Housing
As the financial crisis spreads quickly from Wall Street to other industries, two large home builder projects have received default notices. The problems involve developments in Las Vegas, where house prices have collapsed.
A project involving KB Homes (NYSE: KBH), Lennar (NYSE: LEN), and Toll Brothers (NYSE: TOL) has failed to make interest payments on $765 million in debt.
According to The Wall Street Journal (subscription required), the project is spear-headed by a private company, Focus Property Group.
It is not clear how many other large real estate developments involving public home builders are facing near-term margin calls, but with the falling price of real estate, the problem in Las Vegas is unlikely to be that last one. That means that already weakened firms could face a credit crisis of their own as home prices continue to drop and the potential value of homes under construction face going on the market for a fraction of what they may have brought just a year ago.
Some of the large home building company stocks have lost over two-thirds of their value over the past year, and that may only be the beginning.
Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.
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Filed under: Bad news, Industry, Merrill Lynch (MER)
In the first of what is likely to be an avalanche of suits over the collapse of the auction-rate market, UBS (NYSE: UBS) has been sued for misleading investors. According to The Wall Street Journal (subscription required), the suit claims that “UBS engaged in ‘a deceptive and misleading plan’ to cause its clients to place their money in auction-rate securities instead of customarily liquid investment products such as money-market funds.”
There are two kinds of legal actions the banks and brokerages who ran that auction-rate market since 1985 will face. The first is that clients, both corporate and consumer, will claim that auction-rate securities were not actually the equivalent of cash, but were marketed as such. Individual investors and some public companies are already facing a liquidity crisis as they try to get their money out of auction-rate paper.
The other set of suits will likely be over whether companies like UBS and Merrill Lynch (NYSE: MER) had an obligation to keep the auction-rate market running once they had, over a 20-year period, created an “exchange” that investors could reasonably believe would have regular and successful auctions.
It’s another straw on the back of financial companies where the troubles are growing by the day.
Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.
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Filed under: Wal-Mart (WMT), Columns
Welcome to the 53rd installment of The Wal-Mart Weekly, a column dedicated to bringing you insight, wit, facts, results, opinions, and just a bit of everything else when it comes down to a very hot topic these days: Wal-Mart.
In this week’s Wal-Mart Weekly, I’ll be looking at Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE: WMT) positioning in the consumer electronics category. Wal-Mart has always served customers looking for the latest television sets to iPods to home theater systems, but generally has not focused in on the ‘ministore’ concept for merchandising these products.
When visiting a local Wal-Mart Supercenter this week, I was rather stunned to find a Best Buy Inc. (NYSE: BBY) type of appearance in Wal-Mart’s consumer electronics department. In fact, the new planogram and merchandising arrangement reminded me of — Best Buy itself.
Continue reading The Wal-Mart Weekly: Electronics merchandising makes big leaps
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Filed under: Earnings reports, Google (GOOG), Wal-Mart (WMT), Caterpillar (CAT), Target Corp. (TGT), Kroger Co (KR), NIKE, Inc’B’ (NKE), Blackstone Group L.P (BX)
Here are a few highlights from this past week’s earnings coverage from BloggingStocks:
Continue reading Earnings highlights: Blackstone, Caterpillar, Kroger, WellPoint, Boston Beer, and others
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Filed under: Bad news, Industry, Merrill Lynch (MER)
In the first of what is likely to be an avalanche of suits over the collapse of the auction-rate market, UBS (NYSE: UBS) has been sued for misleading investors. According to The Wall Street Journal (subscription required), the suit claims that “UBS engaged in ‘a deceptive and misleading plan’ to cause its clients to place their money in auction-rate securities instead of customarily liquid investment products such as money-market funds.”
There are two kinds of legal actions the banks and brokerages who ran that auction-rate market since 1985 will face. The first is that clients, both corporate and consumer, will claim that auction-rate securities were not actually the equivalent of cash, but were marketed as such. Individual investors and some public companies are already facing a liquidity crisis as they try to get their money out of auction-rate paper.
The other set of suits will likely be over whether companies like UBS and Merrill Lynch (NYSE: MER) had an obligation to keep the auction-rate market running once they had, over a 20-year period, created an “exchange” that investors could reasonably believe would have regular and successful auctions.
It’s another straw on the back of financial companies where the troubles are growing by the day.
Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.
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Filed under: Comfort Zone Investing
 Ted Allrich is the founder of The Online Investor and author of the just released book: Comfort Zone Investing: Build Wealth And Sleep Well At Night. In this weekly column, he’ll offer advice to investors who are just getting started.
With a seemingly bottomless stock market that has a day or two of great rallies, it’s a good time to review what investing is and what it isn’t, how to start and stay with an investment, and other essentials that help investors weather this storm.
First, investing is not done with any money that you need within a known time period. If you even think you will need a certain amount of money anytime within three years (I prefer to think of five years because of the market’s tendency to overdo everything, bad as well as good), then you don’t want that particular money in the market. Most often, just when you need it, the value of your investment will be down, and you’ll have to take a loss.
Continue reading Comfort Zone Investing: Time to review the basics
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Filed under: Earnings reports, Google (GOOG), Wal-Mart (WMT), Caterpillar (CAT), Target Corp. (TGT), Kroger Co (KR), NIKE, Inc’B’ (NKE), Blackstone Group L.P (BX)
Here are a few highlights from this past week’s earnings coverage from BloggingStocks:
Continue reading Earnings highlights: Blackstone, Caterpillar, Kroger, WellPoint, Boston Beer, and others
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