Stock price: $43.9

Conclusion: Tiffany has been more resilient than we thought thanks to efficient cost control, tight cash management and improved forex. The stock trades at a premium to the sector, which seems justified by its long term growth potential. Despite low visibility in the US and in Japan, we raised our valuation range to $45-47 per share.

Over the past few years there has been a proliferation of new exchange traded funds (ETFs) and exchange traded notes (ETNs) focusing on clean technology, renewable energy and most recently carbon emission.

One such carbon product is the iPath Global Carbon ETN (GRN) which began trading on July 8, 2009. GRN is small with a market capitalization of $3.53 million and an average trading volume of 1,586 shares per day. GRN has a year to date return of -18.51%. GRN is classified as a commodity asset class with a commodity type of carbon allowances. GRN is linked to the Barclays Capital Global Carbon Index. The index tracks the European Union Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS) and the United Nation’s Kyoto protocol Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). The EU ETS and CDM are the two largest carbon emission markets. The iPath Global Carbon ETN is an alternative investment product that is designed to appeal to individuals who want to include a carbon emission component to their portfolio.

Theravance is a leading biopharmaceutical company, Its development programs mostly focus on respiratory diseases, bacterial infections, and gastrointestinal disorders. It entered into collaboration with Astellas in November 2005. The terms of the collaboration specify that Astellas will manufacture and sell VIBATIV while Theravance will help in marketing the drug for the first three years post approval.

See the Reuters Story here.

By Brandon Clay

U.S. consumers love spending money – or at least they used to. Saving money? Not so much. Think back to the three most recent economic growth periods: The Reagan Boom of the mid-1980s, the Clinton Boom of the mid-1990s and the last easy money, easy credit boom from 2003-2007. All three shared one thing in common: consumers spent more money than they had.

Wednesday, we began starter stake in bond insurer Assured Guaranty (AGO) - for those not familiar with the space, think of the 2 disaster of companies called MBIA (MBI) and Ambak (ABK) which we talked about at length in first quarter 2008. This is not my typical fare, but a speculative, "special situation" ... a company whose competitors have been so beaten into the ground, it is currently running a near monopoly on debt issuance for muncipalities.

Technically, the company exploded higher last week on a very surprising earnings report, and has now filled that gap perfectly. I am begining the stake just over $23, with hopes it falls to $20-$21 where I would like to make the position larger. For now, I just did a 0.7% position to get started.

Technology is increasing how much oil or gas companies can produce from a well in a day, and in the overall amount of oil or gas they can recover from a given formation – essentially how fast and how much they produce. Technology is giving investors more leverage to the price of oil.

Buy-recommended Canadian Oil Sands Trust (COSWF.PK) offers unlevered appreciation potential of 46% to a McDep Ratio of 1.0 where stock price would equal Net Present Value (NPV) of US$42 a share. Third quarter results released late on October 28 indicated Ebitda minus Interest of C$0.70 a unit, up from a depressed C$0.14 in the second quarter of 2009.

Despite a steep increase in cash flow, management took a more deliberate approach to increasing the quarterly distribution for the fourth quarter by C$0.10 a unit to C$0.35 from C$0.25 for the third quarter and C$0.15 for the second quarter. Chief Executive Marcel Coutu forecasts full capacity operations, about 350,000 barrels daily, at the Syncrude Joint Venture (36.7% COSWF) for the remainder of 2009. Perhaps looking to the higher profitability of capacity operations and noting high interest by potential buyers, Chief Executive Jim Mulva of ConocoPhillips (COP) may sell all or part of the company’s 9% of Syncrude.

Despite an impressive market rally that has major indexes up around 65% off the March 9 lows, there are still a number of blue-chip stocks delivering handsome dividend yields. ETFs can give a diversified play.

Yields upwards of 3% are being offered by some well-known names, including Kraft Foods (NYSE: KFT), Clorox (NYSE: CLX), Sara Lee (SLE), Sysco (NYSE: SYY), Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ) and Verizon (NYSE: VZ).

Updating IT systems at organizations, which mostly involves personal computers, many of them laptops, can only be good for chip companies. That is why I prefer this week's recommendations of Credit Suisse on the chip sector in the upcoming year, over the more negative remarks last week by Bank of America. Credit Suisse recommends suppliers of DRAM and NAND memory chips, specifically, Samsung (SSNLF.PK), Toshiba (TOSBF.PK), and Micron Technology (MU).

In that regard, I am adding Nova Measuring Instruments Ltd. (NVMI) today, to my portfolio tracked at "Globes". Nova is a small Israeli firm that supplies metrology systems for measurement for the chip sector.

Weathered the Storm

Coach (COH) has weathered the recession extremely well. Although fiscal 2009 ending June 30 was a down year, it was nevertheless their second most profitable year ever. So far fiscal 2010 promises a return to growth. Even though their profitability remained strong, Coach’s stock was pummeled from May of 2007 through February of 2009. Based on strong fundamentals, we felt the price drop was unjustified and overdone. On July 16, 2009 we posted an article stating our case (see article link here).

Mad Money’s Jim Cramer discussed two high-quality infrastructure stocks: Fluor (FLR) and Jacobs Engineering (JEC). He analyzed them from both the technical and fundamental perspective on the segment called “Off the Charts.” Both stocks have greatly underperformed the market benchmarks in the last quarter, with both of them falling nearly 20% over the past 13 weeks. Furthermore, both stocks have fallen over the last twelve months as well compared to the nearly 30% gains in the S&P 500. These two stocks were supposed to be major beneficiaries of the Obama Administrations’ infrastructure stimulus plan, but thus far clearly the market has not reflected that.

Cramer cites a technician who believes that Fluor has strong support and is finished declining. On the other hand, Jacobs Engineering is seeing significantly higher volume on the declines than on the gains, a signal that perhaps there is more downside in store. For an example, look at the huge volume following last week’s earnings announcement from JEC. Based on the charts, the clear choice is Fluor.

Using The Applied Finance Group's (AFG's) Value Expectations interface we have provided an analysis of the expectations embedded in the stock prices of some of the top performers in the S&P 500 year to date (excluding financials) to see which companies have the lowest expectations for sales growth (VE Sales Growth) relative to what the company has been able to deliver historically (5 Year Median Sales Growth).

AFG’s Value Expectations interface provides clients a platform to better understand economic profitability, and at the same time understand the performance a company must deliver to justify its current stock price. By understanding the embedded expectations a company must deliver to justify their current trading price, clients can develop a “hurdle rate” to quickly determine if the company’s expectations are rich or low. Take, for example, the typical company during the tech bubble: the expectations that were priced into the average tech stock far exceeded what it could realistically deliver. For this reason, AFG identified the technology sector as overvalued, as well as potential torpedoes such as Cisco (CSCO), whose expectations were unrealistically high.

DryClean USA (DCU), soon to be known as EnviroStar (EVI), is a distributor of laundry equipment. This is a tiny company, with a market cap of just $7 million. But for value investors who simply focus on buying businesses that trade at discounts to their intrinsic values (instead of trying to apply small-cap or illiquidity discounts), some of this company's numbers are appealing.

The company's market cap is not much higher than its net cash position of $6 million. Often, a stock with a high cash to market cap ratio is one that is a perennial money-loser. But not in this case. Operating income over the last 7 years stands above the company's current market cap. Demand for heavy-duty equipment has of course waned through this recession, but there are two important attributes of this company that reduce its risk: its customers and its suppliers.

As the U.S. dollar has fallen and emerging markets begin to account for an increasing portion of the world’s GDP, exchange traded funds (ETFs) that offer access to global sectors begin to sound like an appealing idea.

Kyle Waller of Index Universe states that investing in global sectors offers the benefits of higher growth possibilities abroad and lower correlations to the broader U.S. market. Additionally, these specific ETFs enable investors to gain both international as well as domestic exposure while limiting risk. (More reasons to go global).

I’ve always been an admirer of the marketing prowess of salesforce.com… although it always drives me crazy to comply with the lower-case spelling of their name because it seems to genericize their value in my eyes.

One of the specific aspects of the company’s marketing tactics which I’ve particularly liked is the way in which it continuously extends its brand identity by incrementally broadening and redefining its functional capabilities. This is a technique which I call “iterative marketing”.

Shares of Cel Sci Corp. (CVM) continued to hover right around the $1.30 mark even after TheStreet.com's infamous biotech blogger thrust his most recent blogging salvo at Cel Sci in an attempt to keep his ongoing vendetta against the company alive - for reasons that are still yet to be known.

We can only speculate as to why Feuerstein spends so much time attempting to attack Cel Sci, but in my opinion, the reasons range from hooking up his friends who are either short the stock and looking to cover and/or hooking up his boys that may want in on a good thing. Additionally, any article regarding Cel Sci will undoubtedly draw many 'hits' to his blog - and those hits are very important for advertising revenue when your living is blogging; hence the need to both stretch out one article over multiple pages (one reader then accounts for multiple hits) and the need to make sure that a Cel Sci article is somehow attached to another published article that has nothing to do with Cel Sci. Pretty slick, I guess the past few days will make up for the lost 'clicks' due to the Thanksgiving holiday.