Urbane Gorilla!

U.S. Banking Index Even More Bearish Than In November

Big Businesses suffer from "Dubya-itis"... Everyone at the top wants to hear that everything is OK and no-one at the bottom has the 'cojones' to tell them the truth till it's too late. (Hence the hurried meeting between Bush, Paulson and Bernanke - after the horse fled the barn.) .... Put another way, one of my old, very tuned into office politics' supervisors used to say 'Perception is everything'. Another's favorite quote was 'Worry about today. Let tomorrow worry about itself."... Although most of us work at levels where we don't see the complete picture, I'm sure that upper management just turn a blind eye to problems for fear of rocking the boat, or becoming the bearer of bad news.

jegan


On Jan 21 01:09 PM kelm wrote:

> What I find most alarming is that the banks seem to have very poor
> predictive capability when it comes to impending losses. GM certainly
> has displayed the same problem. They are either lying to the public,
> or internally lying to them selves (and so the data does not get
> proactively funneled up), or their systems really have no predictive
> ability even on a monthly basis. That makes me wonder whether corporate
> America is really running their business or if they are just riding
> along on them and hoping for the best. My own experience in a large
> Fortune 500 says it is the latter but I had hoped that was an exception.

Ten Top Value Traps with Unreasonably High Dividends

While I'm here.... How about posting the results of the list . Show today's price, today's dividend yield and then show the stock price and yield in say three months.

I'll bet you my "AAPL $175 April calls" that the author is correct and not only will the yield be wayyyyy down, but so will the stock. Not sure why everyone is hammering them for posting good advice.

jegan ;-)

Ten Top Value Traps with Unreasonably High Dividends

I agree completely with the author's statement:

"Even if the firm can support a higher dividend yield, many will choose to reduce their dividend simply by being in an environment where everyone else is. The result: the share price drops even further after investors who expected high yield jump ship. "

If you really like the company... Take your last dividend, sell while you can, buy something else temporarily that has already taken a beating for reducing its dividend. Collect that till your 'favorite stock' gets hammered after reducing the dividend and then buy back in at the lows..... What a deal! Everyone's a winner!!!

jegan

11 Stocks Selling Below Cash

I agree with fatcat as well.

Irish banks? Please! South American banks? They haven't been hit with the still unfolding commodity collapse.

The only two I see as **not too spooky** are Yangzou and Sandia. And those two only because they are **not as** connected to the outside world's ills right now. Both tend to have a moat as they service their countries internally.

However! That is not to say that they will not be tarred with the same brush as their counterparts.

And I like PDA better than SDA and still prefer BTU over YCZ anyway..

But interesting list if and when the world's economies begin to pick up...

thx jegan

The Ten Highest Yielding NYSE Stocks

"Itsonlymoney" .... The reason there is a difference in the above dividend quote and that of Yahoo Finance is how different sites calculate the dividend yield.

Yahoo apparently takes the last dividend and multiplies it by the number of payments per year to get $3.40 and divides it to come up with the 11.9 % yield you noted.

The figure quoted in the article takes a slightly different tack... They add up all the **real** dividends and divide to come up with a 'yearly' dividend.

So: 51+58+60+85 = $2.54 total dividend for the year.
$2.54/$30.70 = 0.082736156351792% ...

Or as of right this moment about 8.3% yearly yield.

If you have an MLP or paying stock that issues regular as clockwork payments (such as ADVDX at 14%), you can get by with using the last payment. The idea is that if the payments increase, then it is expected that the future payments will be the same.

The problem arises when you have a stock or MLP that varies their payments. In the case of shipping and some energy or mining stocks (HTE comes to mind), a drop in business climate might cause a marked drop in the expected payments and you cannot trust the last payment to continue. Sometimes MLPs etc have special payments as well which throw off the calcs. These payments can be separate, or included at the same time as the regular dividend. You can see that by blindly using the last payment as a means of calculating your returns is not necessarily effective.

So... Regular paying stocks, you can normally use the last payment to calculate. Irregular paying stocks, or those that vary seasonally, it's probably better to use the yearly.

And it doesn't hurt to inspect the dividends over a few years and in conjunction with established companies with a longer track record. I find it best to go to Yahoo Finance's interactive chart, pull up a three year range and click on 'show dividends'. This way I can see how the dividends compare to the stock price over a period of time. It could alert you to a cyclical short dividend on the horizon.

jegan ;-)

10 Highest Yielding Semi-Annual Dividend Payers

Just bought half a position in CPL this AM.. Expect it to drop a bit more the next time the market turns down... It's a good story.... However, the others bother me a bit.... Several of them are financials, and although they are not US banks, the UK shows signs of that aggravating mange that we just went through...

Also, there are plenty of other dividend payers that not only pay higher, but are in hotter sectors .. Oil and Gas and Shipping .. Off the top of my head DRYS, FRO, HTE (which I wouldn't buy... ) PGH, ... Thx jegan ;-)