http://zestinvest.com buttery ideas smeared with corny name Mon, 16 Jan 2012 19:02:31 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en There are three well-known ways of valuing the stock market that are based on publicly available information. Two are based on earnings: 1) The ratio of total stock market capitalization to gross national product (GNP). The market cap. to GNP ratio was popularized by Warren Buffet. 2) A cyclically adjusted PE ... http://zestinvest.com/2012/01/01/market-indicators-dec-31-2011/ A textbook example of a penny-stock pumping operation: * PuraMed Bioscience (PMBS) has a "going concern" warning from its auditor, and has stated that it cannot continue business without raising money. Source: annual report. * The company had $30,000 in sales last year, while the 2 executives paid themselves $180,000 and enormous ... http://zestinvest.com/2012/01/01/puramed-bioscience-pmbs-lipigesic-penny-stock-scams/ Can amateurs time the market? Some simple, non-proprietary indicators that make sense: The 200-day moving average profits from trends. In this system, the market is trending upward when it crosses its moving average (buy), and falling when it corsses below (sell). The system fails in cyclical markets, i.e where mean-reversion profits. ... http://zestinvest.com/2011/12/26/market-timing/ Barron's has an article on this topic as well, coming to similar conclusions. It endorses Novartis (NVS), partly because it has a sizable toe in the generic drug business, which should benefit from a wave of expiring patents. See A Prescription for Profiting From Drug Stocks http://zestinvest.com/2011/07/10/bmy-vs-mrk-update/ It's hard to own oil. Most of the ETFs that present themselves as vehicles for owning oil do a poor job of it. They own futures, rather than physical oil. Most of the major oil companies are a mixture of oil, natural gas, and refining operations. For example, Exxon-Mobile now ... http://zestinvest.com/2011/06/29/how-to-own-oil-not-refiners-not-natural-gas-oil/ An interesting, albeit speculative, graph of the effect of drug pipelines on revenue: http://www.bnet.com/blog/drug-business/where-the-drugs-are-the-best-and-worst-pharma-r-d-pipelines/7450 The article also notes that Bristol-Meyers will have to spend a lot on research in order to achieve that result, and that "estimates are notoriously unreliable". Still, they are equally unreliable across companies. At first glance, BMY seems to ... http://zestinvest.com/2011/06/20/brostol-meyers-squibb-bmy/ AT&T seems to be buying the operations of T-Mobile from Deutsch Telecom. In other words, it's not assuming debt or cash. More details will be needed to be certain, but if this is correct, then the purchase price is reflective of the enterprise value (EV) of the company. At $39 ... http://zestinvest.com/2011/03/20/att-buys-t-mobile-whats-sprint-worth/ Alternative energy is getting none of the boost that it has previously gotten from high oil prices. The reasoning has always been that high oil prices incentivizes investment in alternatives. It makes them cost competetive, and it makes the public conscious of the need to develop a diversity of sources. ... http://zestinvest.com/2010/12/22/oil-v-alternative-energy/ The Charles Schwab site is rather big and complicated, and has gotten bigger and complicateder in the last few years. Sometimes, even customer service doesn't quite know where to find things. For months, the site featured Credit Suisse's Focus List under Research/Markets/Idea & Strategies. Then it disappeared, and four customer ... http://zestinvest.com/2010/12/21/schwab-sectors/ Scary article about Brazil in Bloomberg: Late payments on credit-card and other consumer loans jumped 23 percent in November from a year earlier, the biggest increase since 2001, according to Experian Plc, a credit-risk consulting firm in Dublin. Brazil, the fourth fastest-growing of the Group of 20 nations, is also attracting ... http://zestinvest.com/2010/12/20/24/