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Shanda Games Ltd. (GAME)

Q1 2013 Earnings Conference Call

May 22, 2013, 21:00 PM ET

Executives

Xiangdong Zhang - CEO and Chief Producer

Richard Wei - CFO

Tunghai Chien - President

Ellen Chiu - IR

Analysts

Timothy Chan - Morgan Stanley

Thomas Chong - Bank of China

Mark Marostica - Piper Jaffray

Evan Zhou - JPMorgan

George Meng - Macquarie Securities

William Hill - Barclays

Andy Yeung - Oppenheimer & Co.

Muzhi Li - Citigroup

Presentation

Operator

Welcome to Shanda Games Limited First Quarter 2013 Financial Results Conference Call. The conference call will be recorded and available for replay in its entirety. A copy of Shanda Games 2013 first quarter results announcement can be found and downloaded from its Investor Relations website at http://ir.shandagames.com. At this time, all lines have been placed in a listen-only mode and the floor will be open for questions

When I learned about BlackBerry's (BBRY) acquisition of QNX in 2011, I was admittedly curious about who these folks were and how the BlackBerry 10 OS was "built on a QNX OS." What was it that Research in Motion, and at the time, Mike Lazaridis, saw in this developer of UNIX-esque operating systems? In recent interviews, Thorsten Heins (BBRY CEO) lauded QNX's for providing the "embedded systems" behind rail trains, nuclear power plants, and medical devices. It turns out they also build the "infotainment" systems (including the UI, Navigation, Bluetooth connectivity, etc.) for over 20 million cars worldwide. Their customers include Acura, BMW, Audi, and believe it or not, Samsung.

Here is what BBRY had to say in its most recent annual report, about QNX and what they have in store (Page 17, second paragraph):

Leveraging and capitalizing on the embedded market. Over the past

The short answer is: Yes. Any weakness in the market is a buying opportunity today. The market sell-off on Wednesday was a result of only two factors: 1) Bernanke saying that bond purchases can be slowed 2) Fed minutes showing that participants are talking about scaling back the bond purchases. Point 1 above is an outcome of point 2, and not vice-versa. That is, Bernanke is still as dovish as he has always been. In fact, for most of his testimony he was focused on affirming that bond purchases have been working for the economy and he does not want to scale back anytime soon.

And here is a finer point from both Bernanke's testimony and Fed statement from last month: The Fed is still keeping itself fully engaged in that if it sees any weakness then it will increase the bond purchases again.

So this market sell-off is really

With Sirius XM's (SIRI) recently added debt, the rise in the stock price, and the shrinking of the share count via a share buyback program, it is perhaps a good time to explore the current valuation of Sirius XM. While there are many ways to value a company I like to use the EV/EBITDA method because Sirius XM is a media company and media companies tend to be valued on their EBITDA growth and free cash flow growth.

(click to enlarge)

The EV/EBITDA method is obtained by taking the Enterprise value and dividing it by EBITDA. Enterprise Value is the Market Cap + Debt - Cash. EBITDA is the earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization. Historically, Sirius XM has traded at a multiple of between 17 (on the low side) and 24 (on the high side). As the components of the formula change, the multiple will change as well.

After all of the excitement leading up to it, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has finally launched its next generation low power, thin-and-light oriented product called "Kabini" for the 9W to 25W space. Anandtech, the world's leading hardware review site, managed to get its review up in a timely fashion, and as a result, the financial community can get a better sense of just what this product means for AMD and its future.

The "Kabini" Lineup - 9W to 25W TDP

Here's the lineup of parts that AMD is launching today:

(click to enlarge)

So what we see here is at the very high end, we get two quad core APUs: one with a TDP of 25W and one with a TDP of 15W. The dual cores consume from 9W to 15W, with varying graphics/CPU clock speeds.

These will, as AMD points out in its competitive comparison slides, go head-to-head

The recent Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) and Bernanke induced fall in the AUD (FXA) has drawn lots of attention. Betting on the end of the commodity supercycle has been a common theme, or perhaps nightmare, in the past few years, seeing that commodity currencies have remained stubbornly high. Is the RBA and Bernanke's latest move likely to send the AUD into a downtrend?

Yes, but don't expect big things to happen in the short run. As a speculator that's been anticipating the end of the commodity supercycle for years, I know how it feels like to see the AUD/USD at 1.00 and imagine it at 0.7 or even 0.6 at some point. But I think there is one salient point many market analysts and participants are missing.

Who's your banker?

The fact remains that foreigners own around 200 billion AUD of Australian government bonds. More importantly, the consensus view

Q4 2013 Earnings Call

May 22, 2013 8:30 pm ET

Executives

Louis Gries - Chief Executive Officer, Executive General Manager of U.S.A, Executive Director and Member of Financial Statements Disclosure Committee

Russell Chenu - Chief Financial Officer and Member of Financial Statements Disclosure Committee

Sean O’Sullivan - Vice President of Investor & Media Relations and Member of Financial Statements Disclosure Committee

Analysts

Simon Thackray - Nomura Securities Co. Ltd., Research Division

Andrew Peros - Crédit Suisse AG, Research Division

Andrew Johnston - CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets, Research Division

Liam Farlow - Macquarie Research

Michael John Ward - Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Research Division

Emily Behncke - Deutsche Bank AG, Research Division

Andrew Geoffrey Scott - CIMB Research

Jason Harley Steed - JP Morgan Chase & Co, Research Division

David A. Leitch - UBS Investment Bank, Research Division

Matthew McNee - Goldman Sachs & Partners Australia Pty Ltd,

As I type this, the market is exhibiting some bipolar disorder following multiple doses of Fed speak: Tuesday Bullard's presentation in Germany and Dudley's speech in New York, and Wednesday Bernanke's congressional testimony at 10 AM and the latest Fed Minutes at 2 PM.

Amidst the market confusion, I took a few minutes to review the Wall Street Journal's May survey of economists to see what they had forecast for the 10-year yield and the Fed Funds Rate out to December 2015. The survey was conducted May 3-7 and 48 economists responded, although some omitted responses to some questions.

The bond market is a few minutes from closing. A peak at Bloomberg shows the 10-year yield at 2.03 percent. Thus far in 2013 the closing low was 1.66 (twice, on May 1st and 2nd) and the closing high was 2.07 on March 11. The first chart shows

by Ron Rimkus, CFA

According to legend, Russian minister Grigory Potemkin erected fake settlements along the banks of the Dnieper River in order to fool Empress Catherine II during her visit to Crimea in 1787. According to Kyle Bass, managing director of Hayman Capital, central banks around the world today have erected their own Potemkin villages to deceive the public into thinking that the world's economic problems are solved. They aren't.

In a recent conversation with Bass, a prominent central banker noted that a central bank pursuing aggressive monetary policy can have some positive effect on economic growth. However, the simultaneous engagement in expansionary monetary policy by many central banks yields almost no benefit to economic growth. To illustrate this point, Bass showed a chart of the balance sheet growth of the four major central banks (U.S. Federal Reserve, Bank of Japan (BOJ), European Centrak Bank (ECB) and People's

Intel's (INTC) Atom line of products is, in my view, set to dramatically revolutionize the way that Intel does business going forward. While many of the arguments/observations that I will make in this piece are equally applicable to the "Core" line of micro-processors, I am confident that the trend will be most evident in the new market segments that Intel targets with products based on its "Atom" core. Intel, after many years of being a hardcore, high performance CPU design company, is about to become the world's premier system-on-chip design firm.

Some Background

Intel primarily develops two lines of CPU cores. The first is the "big Core," development of which happens at two main locations: Haifa, Israel and Hillsboro, Oregon. The Oregon team is responsible for this year's "Haswell," and next year's "Broadwell," and the Israel team is responsible for "Sky Lake" and its 10nm "tick" successor (apparently it's

Google (GOOG) stepped further into the world of audio entertainment Wednesday when the company emailed millions of Android users with an announcement of the Google All Access music service. Consumers were offered 30 days of unlimited music access where they can listen to millions of tracks any time, customize stations, and build play-lists. After the 30 day free trial the service can be continued for just $7.99 per month. Details from the email are below:

Introducing All Access, the new music service from Google Play that lets you listen to all the music you want - on your mobile device and the web.

Try All Access for free for 30 days. After the trial, keep listening for just $7.99 per month when you start your trial by June 30, 2013.

Play anything you like. From today's hits to classic tunes, you'll find millions of songs by your favorite

Microsoft (NYSE: MSFT) announced on May 21 the upcoming release of its new generation Xbox gaming console, the Xbox One. It will be packed with loads of breakthrough features that will probably raise the gaming entertainment standard to a higher level. The scheduled release date is not set yet, but it could be anytime later this year. While the Xbox One will surely rock the gaming console industry, will this be enough to trigger a rally of Microsoft shares?

For the past weeks, Microsoft rallied and gained 7% month-to-date. Year-to-date growth is a whopping 27%. The announcement on the upcoming release of Xbox One may further boost the current rally, but whether the actual launch will trigger another rally or not, that remains to be seen.

The gaming console is just a part of one major segment of Microsoft, which is the entertainment and devices division. This segment contributes

May 22, 2013 10:30 am ET

Executives

Matthew M. Mannelly - Chief Executive Officer, President and Director

Timothy J. Connors - Executive Vice President of Sales & Marketing

Ronald M. Lombardi - Chief Financial Officer and Principal Accounting Officer

Analysts

Frank A. Camma - Sidoti & Company, LLC

Joseph Altobello - Oppenheimer & Co. Inc., Research Division

Olivia Tong - BofA Merrill Lynch, Research Division

William M. Reuter - BofA Merrill Lynch, Research Division

Presentation

Matthew M. Mannelly

Good morning. Welcome, and thank you very much for coming. We're very excited to talk to you today. This is the first for us, our first ever Investor Day. And we think we have some exciting things to talk about, and we appreciate you being here this morning. So we look forward to getting into it. We're going to -- we tried to keep the words on

Wednesday's market was a roller coaster. After being up more than 150 points on the Dow early in the day, the market reversed and ended significantly down across the board. This is the first time this type of reversal has hit the market since March 2009 as investors seemed to wake up and realize how dependent the market is on continued massive Federal Reserve largesse.

I think it is too early to deploy major cash into the market as I think we have a significant pull back ahead. However, putting some cash into the market in small amounts on days like these makes some sense. Finding stocks that are performing better than the overall market appears to be a sound strategy. Here are two independent energy concerns that bucked the sell-off Wednesday on back of analysts' upgrades.

Pioneer Natural Resources (PXD): $143 a share, is a large (~$20B market capitalization)

Earlier today we looked at US sector weightings, and below we take a look at the percentage of total world stock market cap that the largest countries make up. As shown below, the US and Japan, which were the two largest stock markets at the start of the year, have added

With Tuesday's dovish duo Bullard and Dudley to set expectations, the S&P 500 rallied in anticipation of Chairman Bernanke's congressional testimony and soared to its all-time intraday high, up 1.07% during his prepared remarks. But the Q&A deflated the balloon, and the 2 PM release of the latest Fed Minutes accelerated the decline. It seems that the possibility of tapering QE in the near term is not entirely off the table. The index hit its -1.23% intraday low about 30 minutes before the final bell. It then trimmed its loss to close down 0.83%. The 10-year yield jumped 9 bps to close at 2.03%, just off the 2013 interim high of 2.07% on

Annual Meeting of Stockholders Conference Transcript

May 22, 2013 4:30 PM ET

Executives

Pat Gage - Chairman

Lynne Parshall - Member of the Board

Robert Blum - President and CEO

Sharon Barbari - EVP, Finance and CFO

Marjorie Wagman - VP Legal Affairs and General Counsel

[Aaron Kurtz] - Senior Director, Finance

Dave Cragg - Senior Vice President, Human Resources

Joanna Goldstein - Independent Director

Scott Jordan - Independent Director

Wendell Wierenga - Independent Director

[Adrian Bennett] - PricewaterhouseCoopers

James Kirkland - Inspector of Election, Computershare

Analysts

Presentation

Pat Gage

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Pat Gage, and I’m the Chairman of Cytokinetics Board of Directors. It’s pleasure to welcome you for our 2013 Annual Meeting of Stockholders. The meeting is now called to order. I’ve asked Marjorie Wagman, Cytokinetics Vice President of Legal Affairs and General Counsel to record the minutes.

Before proceeding

B. Riley & Co. 2013 Annual Investor Conference

May 22, 2013 05:00 pm ET

Executives

Ron Black – President & Chief Executive Officer

Analysts

Presentation

Host

It’s my great pleasure to have Rambus back at our conference. For those that don’t know we used to have official coverage on Rambus in my first go around here on the sell side at B. Riley.

And the company is really undergoing a remarkable transformation right now engineered by the new CEO Ron Black and the rest of the Management Team and Board. We also have CFO Satish Rishi in the audience. And finally the company’s moving away from being so confrontational with some of the companies that would like to collaborate with them and it’s also developing some interesting products that are coming to parket this year. So with that, please Ron.

Ron Black

Thanks, Mike. So just a

For the vast majority of people in the United States, the name Tim Hortons (THI) means absolutely nothing. However, talk to a Canadian and if they aren't smitten with the chain, their family, friends and neighbors probably are. THI develops and franchises restaurants serving coffee, espresso, cappuccino and other specialty beverages along with donuts/baked goods, Paninis, soups, sandwiches and other delectable fare. Founded in 1964, as of December 31st, 2012, THI owns or franchises 4,264 restaurants: 3,436 in Canada, 804 in the U.S. and 24 in the Gulf Cooperation Council (the political/economic union of countries primarily on the Arabian Peninsula).

While THI is a dominant player in its home market, with one restaurant for every 10,000 Canadians (McDonald's (MCD) by comparison has one restaurant for every 24,500 Canadians), the company has experienced trouble translating this success south of the border. By the company's own estimates, Canadian expansion is near its

Q1 2013 Results Earnings Call

May 22, 2013 5:00 PM ET

Executives

Gene Ballesteros - Treasurer and Head, Investor Relations

Jim Atchison - President and CEO

Jim Heaney - Chief Financial Officer

Analysts

Tim Conder - Wells Fargo Securities

Afua Ahwoi - Goldman Sachs

Alexia Quadrani - J.P. Morgan

Michael Nathanson - Nomura

Tim Nollen - Macquarie

Bryan Goldberg - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Jason Bazinet - Citi

Presentation

Operator

Please stand by. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to SeaWorld’s First Quarter 2013 Earnings Conference Call. My name is Kelsey, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the prepared remarks the management from SeaWorld will conduct a question-and-answer session, and conference participants will be given instructions at that time. As a reminder, today’s conference is being

F1Q 2014 Earnings Conference Call

May 22, 2013 17:00 ET

Executives

Mike Haase - VP Finance, Treasurer and Investor Relations

Aneel Bhusri - Chairman and Co-Chief Executive Officer

Mark Peek - Chief Financial Officer

Analysts

Heather Bellini - Goldman Sachs

John DiFucci - JPMorgan

Jennifer Lowe - Morgan Stanley

Jason Maynard - Wells Fargo

Brendan Barnicle - Pacific Crest Securities

Richard Davis - Canaccord

Peter Goldmacher - Cowen & Company

Pat Walravens - JMP Securities

Brent Thill - UBS

Robert Chen - Citigroup

Ross McMillan - Jefferies

Brian Schwartz - Oppenheimer

Presentation

Operator

Welcome to Workday’s First Quarter Earnings Call. At this time all participants are in a listen-only mode. We will conduct a question-and-answer session towards the end of this conference.

With that I will hand the call over to Mike Haase. Please proceed.

Mike Haase - VP Finance, Treasurer and Investor Relations

Welcome to Workday’s

For those just learning about the drug, Belviq is an FDA-approved weight loss aid developed by Arena Pharmaceuticals (ARNA). Its intended benefit to patients is to reduce the user's appetite, thus leading the user to consume less calories and ultimately lose weight.

One issue that will have great importance to Arena and the success of Belviq is whether doctors are legally permitted to prescribe Belviq for off label uses (uses intended for conditions other than weight loss). The answer to this question should have much bearing on the amount of Belviq prescriptions that will be written, at least in the short term.

As a Plaintiff's attorney, I often see the public throwing around words such as "liability," "negligence," and "causation" in ways that sometimes make my colleagues and I chuckle but often make us extremely concerned. Daily I get phone calls from potential clients, many of whom tell me stories

May 22, 2013 4:30 pm ET

Executives

Terrence A. Duffy - Executive Chairman, President, Chairman of Executive Committee and Member of Strategic Steering Committee

Kathleen M. Cronin - Senior Managing Director, General Counsel and Secretary

Phupinder S. Gill - Chief Executive Officer, Director, Member of Executive Committee and Member of Strategic Steering Committee

Presentation

Terrence A. Duffy

Well, good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. It's my pleasure to welcome you to the 2013 Annual Meeting of Shareholders of CME Group, and I call the meeting to order. I'm Terry Duffy. I'm the Executive Chairman and President of CME Group, and I will be presiding at this meeting.

With us today in the audience are members of the CME Group Board of Directors, our management team, and joining me on the dais are Phupinder Gill, our CEO; Jamie Parisi, our CFO; and Kathleen Cronin, our General Counsel and

Executive Summary

Market lore and disclaimers from ETF companies warn investors to stay away from double reverse ETFs for trades longer than a few days. This caution is unnecessary for investors using stock ETFs to be short the Japanese yen. During the last 140 days of the yen's current declining trend, being short via YCS was twice as lucrative as using FXY. If the yen's declining trend continues, YCS should continue to be the vehicle of choice for stock investors.

Introduction

Shorting the yen has gotten increasingly popular, especially since Japan elected the Abe Government. The Bank of Japan, urged on by the Abe Government, has set out to double the monetary base by doing $80 million in Quantitative Easing (QE) per month. The yen has declined in value against the dollar as a result. The Government of Japan obviously considers the declining yen, a predictable result of their QE