Bemis Company, Inc. (BMS) manufactures and sells flexible packaging products and pressure sensitive materials primarily in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America, Europe, and the Asia Pacific. The company operates in two segments, Flexible Packaging and Pressure Sensitive Materials. The company is member of the S&P 500 and was a recent addition to the S&P Dividend Aristocrats index.
Bemis Company has paid dividends annually since 1922 and quarterly since 1931 and consistently increased payments to common shareholders every year for 26 years.

From the end of 1998 up until December 2008 this dividend growth stock has delivered a negative annual average total return of 5.30% to its shareholders. The stock has lost over one third from its all-time high in 2007.

Commodity prices have taken it on the chin lately. The CRB Index, for instance, has fallen 12 percent since mid June. The move has been attributed in large part to strength in the U.S. dollar and continued signs of economic weakness among the developing nations. While the U.S., Europe and Japan may indeed remain weak for a time, from where we sit the worst is over for key commodities, namely gold and crude oil.

Wednesday gold closed below $908 an ounce, a pullback of 8 percent from its recent highs. The case for gold remains as strong as ever, for all of the reasons we’ve recounted in past issues. Although we obviously can’t rule out the possibility of the metal pulling back further—to $880 in a worst-case scenario—we fully expect gold to take out its recent high above $985 in the next couple of months.

By Jeff St. John

Swiss startup ReVolt Technology will have chemical giant BASF's (BASFY.PK) help in commercializing its rechargeable zinc-air batteries, the companies announced Thursday.

Stocks that are lesser known offer many of the best investment opportunities as people fail to accurately price the security, and lack of Analyst coverage on the Street does not pin any valuation price target.

However, simple valuation metrics compared to industry and market averages allow any investor to find disconnects to take advantage of as a longer term investment.

F3Q09 Earnings Call

July 9, 2009 5:00 pm ET

After the close on Wednesday, Alcoa (AA) released earnings and it was mixed, in that while the company beat estimates, the actual results were horribly poor.

Notes:

Agricultural investing is getting a lot of attention lately. A few examples follow:

1) It’s interesting to see a major university endowment get behind the idea of farm investing in a fairly significant way:

Forget oil, if you’re seeking exposure to the global economic recovery; look to copper and coal, says Citigroup’s global head of commodity research, Alan Heap.

The fundamental outlook is strongest for copper, coking coal and thermal coal, he told clients. Mr. Heap is also still positive on gold, but remains negative on iron ore. As for potential surprises, he suggested nickel and aluminum could be the place to be.

They say it’s not what you have but how you use it.

Alcoa (AA) has the aluminum, and reported 2Q09 results last night and Boeing (BA) uses aluminum to make planes and they’ve been plagued by a litany of problems in trying to get their new Dreamliner off the ground, literally, so I thought it would be worth a look at how things are going in getting from bauxite to business class.

You may recall that the first two weeks of Q1 2009's earnings season had the perma-bears calling for earnings disasters in the Q1 results. Much of the media piled on proclaiming that a "sucker rally" was in progress. We are still waiting on that proverbial next leg down...

But then the earnings season kicked off with Alcoa (AA) painting a quite rosy picture for 2009.

We won't go through the earnings results as everyone is aware that they came in better-than-expected, driven by cost reduction and strong demand in China. Another pleasant surprise was the Company's revenue figure, which was nearly $300MM higher than what the analysts were looking for.

Flowserve [NYSE:FLS] July 7, 2009 close: $61.86
52-week range: $37.18 (Nov. 20. 2008) - $145.45 (July 31, 2008)
Dividend = $0.27 quarterly = 1.75% current yield

Company profile by MSN MoneyCentral:

Before we look at the evidence being put forward by the market let us look at what Jim Grant has been saying in his latest issue of Grant's Interest Rate Observer. He makes the following points that we find very interesting.

Back in February, I profiled a great infrastructure “pick & shovel” company. Praxair (NYSE: PX) is a global Fortune 300 company, the largest industrial gases company in the Americas, and one of the largest in the world.

Investors saw PX climb up almost 25% before pulling back. Since our recommendation, it’s up almost 10% - and we think it can run even more.

Below we highlight our trading range charts of ten major commodities. The green shading represents between two standard deviations above and below the commodity's 50-day moving average, and a move above or below this green shading is considered overbought or oversold.

On the energy front, oil and natural gas have declined quite a bit over the last week. Oil remains in the center of its trading range, however, while most other commodities are now in oversold territory. Gold, silver and platinum have all pulled back sharply since early June, while corn, wheat, and coffee have fallen off a cliff. The one commodity that has bucked the overall downtrend is orange juice. It was in oversold territory just a couple of weeks ago, but it has rallied nicely in recent days.

Alcoa (AA) is expected to report earnings this afternoon which traditionally marks the beginning of earnings season. Alcoa shares have taken a major hit this recession with demand for basic materials such as aluminum depleting rapidly. Revenues from flat-rolled products such as aluminum make up most of the companies revenue have declined 35% on a quarter over quarter basis. Total revenue from all business operations declined by a similar amount during the 1st quarter of 2009.

Analysts are expecting similar declines in revenues for the 2nd quarter of 2009 with the average estimate coming in at $3.97 billion. If Alcoa were to meet these low estimates it would clock in a 48% quarter over quarter decrease. Over the past 2 weeks, analysts have been jockeying their estimates and we have seen several upgrades and a few downgrades. Just yesterday 3 analysts changed their outlook with 2 out of the 3 moving estimates higher and the other lower. This may have been in response to Alcoa’s chief executive Klaus Kleinfeld’s statement yesterday saying that “China is out of the woods and growing, particularly in its automobile and commercial-building and construction markets.”