Stock Trading Remains in a Slide After ’08 Crisis
May 6, 2012
Mario Tama/Getty Images The New York Stock Exchange. Investors have pulled away from stocks and instead are favoring bonds, despite low interest rates.
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Mario Tama/Getty Images
The New York Stock Exchange. Investors have pulled away from stocks and instead are favoring bonds, despite low interest rates.
Even though American stocks have doubled in price in the last three years, investors and traders large and small keep giving the market the cold shoulder.
Trading in the United States stock market has not only failed to recover since the 2008 financial crisis, it has continued to fall. In April, the average daily trades in American stocks on all exchanges stood at nearly half of its peak in 2008: 6.5 billion compared with 12.1 billion, according to Credit Suisse Trading Strategy.
The decline stands in marked contrast to past economic recoveries, when Americans regained their taste for stock trading within two years of economic shocks in 1987 and 2001.
This time around, the stock market has many more players, including high-speed trading firms, which have recently come to account for over half of all stock market activity. But even they, like all other major groups, have recently been doing less overall trading.
“When you keep in mind recent history, this is kind of uncharted territory,” said Justin Schack, an analyst at Rosenblatt Securities.
Many market experts say the biggest reason for the shrinking volume is that traders and investors remain leery that the economy will suddenly turn on them in the wake of the financial crisis, the wild swings in stock prices and the European debt troubles.
Investors and financial industry professionals are struggling to understand what the decline could mean, particularly if it continues. Less rapid trading by short-term speculators could be a good thing for buy-and-hold investors tired of being burned by the market. But the decline could also signal a broader turn away from the domestic stock market by investors who want to hold less of their nest eggs in stocks and by companies that opt for raising capital in bond markets instead of issuing shares.
“My expectation was that we would see people go back to the stock market,” said Charles Rotblut, a vice president of the American Association of Individual Investors. “It remains to be seen whether there will be a core group of people that is just turned off of the stock markets altogether.”
The New York-based system of stock trading has been showing the strain of the slowdown. The New York Stock Exchange said last week that trading in the first quarter fell 23 percent from a year earlier. A few days earlier, Nasdaq announced that its first-quarter revenues from stock trading in the United States were down 7 percent from a year ago. Both exchange companies have aggressively moved to capture other businesses that do not rely on stock trading, but they have also embarked on cost-cutting programs.
“We can’t be certain as to when or whether the volume is going to recover,” said Lee Shavel, chief financial officer at the Nasdaq OMX Group.
The recent slowdown has occurred not only on the nation’s 13 official exchanges and trading platforms. Dozens of off-exchange operations have captured a larger proportion of all stock trades in recent years, but even their overall trading numbers have been trending down.
The decline in trading has not sent the prices of stocks down. Though there is less buying and selling, the people who have remained in the market are willing to pay higher prices, driving the value of the benchmark Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index up 102 percent since the market hit a bottom in the spring of 2009.
But the recent falloff in trading is striking because data from the New York Stock Exchange shows that volumes have not declined for three consecutive years in records going back to 1960. For an explanation of the lower trading volumes, many market-watchers have looked to the high-speed traders, who use computers algorithms to take advantage of small price discrepancies and who have accounted for an increasing share of all trading in recent years.
These firms have been curtailed slightly by recent regulations aimed at making the markets less volatile. But more fundamentally, industry participants say high-speed traders rely on transacting with slower, traditional traders like retail investors and mutual funds. When those groups pull back, the high-speed firms have little choice but to scale back as well.
“On a typical trade, two high-frequency trading firms will not trade against each other,” said Manoj Narang. His New Jersey high-speed trading firm, Tradeworx, is still growing, he said, but for most established firms, if ordinary investors “don’t want to trade, there’s really simply nothing for us to do.”
Among retail investors, the most reliable source of trading volume has been the day traders who were given access to cheaper trading by discount brokers like E*Trade and TD Ameritrade.
Occupy Wall Street — fresh fury, or fizzling out?
May 2, 2012
By Sebastian Smith | AFP – In a kamikaze-style act of defiance, a young Occupy Wall Street protester crystallized what some would call the power and others the utter futility of the leftwing protest movement. The incident came at the culmination of daylong marches in New York and across the United States on Tuesday — protests billed as returning Occupy to the forefront of American politics
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By Sebastian Smith | AFP –
In a kamikaze-style act of defiance, a young Occupy Wall Street protester crystallized what some would call the power and others the utter futility of the leftwing protest movement.
The incident came at the culmination of daylong marches in New York and across the United States on Tuesday — protests billed as returning Occupy to the forefront of American politics.
Darting from the crowd wedged into New York‘s Financial District, the youngster dodged a dozen police officers and managed to slap the famous bronze bull statue that has become a totem of US capitalism and hate symbol for the anti-corporate left.
The man was cuffed and forced to the ground within seconds. Yet to the delight of cheering protesters, this rebel with a cause was not finished.
Two cops tried to pick him up. He wriggled free. Six cops tried to put him in a squad car. He kicked the door open. They pushed, pulled. They still couldn’t manage.
By now at least 20 police, including several senior officers, were involved.
Crowd cheers became jeers.
“This is what a police state looks like!” came the chant.
When cops finally slammed the squad car door, the protester kicked out a rear window, showering his captors with glass. They looked astonished.
A second vehicle arrived and a third. Up came an officer with a straightjacket.
“All of you against just one person. Shame on you!” yelled one heckler.
“A straightjacket. Why don’t you just shoot him, huh?” chimed in another.
The obvious discomfort of the police, surrounded by thousands of people, was a moment of triumph for the crowd, proof that their mantra of “take back the streets” had been fulfilled.
Or perhaps not.
Soon the hecklers moved on. The bull and the financial system it represents remained standing. A van hauled away the anonymous protester.
He didn’t even get his picture in Wednesday’s New York papers.
Leslie Feldman, a politics professor at Hofstra University, said the jury remains out on how much the Occupy movement matters.
“It’s captured the imagination of the country. It has captured the imagination, possibly, of the voters,” she said.
A particular achievement, she noted, was Occupy’s shifting of public discourse over wealth, with Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, for example, constantly on the defensive over his fortune.
But will street marches bring concrete change in what Occupy sees as unfair, elitist government and bank policies?
“No,” Feldman said. “I don’t think there’s going to be a bailout, say, of college debt…. They’d have to run for office, go as a group and visit congressman and senators.”
Certainly marchers on Tuesday were thrilled at their sheer numbers, the noise and vibrancy of the crowd, and brief victories in cat-and-mouse game with police.
On Wednesday, Occupy Wall Street was already announcing its next actions — a protest over public education funding cuts and a demonstration outside Sotheby’s in Manhattan, where Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” painting was expected to sell for an astonishing $80 million.
However, although claiming to fight for “the 99 percent” against an entrenched one percent, Occupy activists at times emerge as little more than a nuisance.
“It’s useless. Nothing will change because of this,” a frustrated young woman said, finding her path back from work blocked by police and demonstrators late Tuesday. “All I want to do is be able to go home after working my a(expletive) off all day.”
Students Studying Abroad: Take Advantage of Video Job Interviews
April 29, 2012
By Josh Tolan | Mashable – Josh Tolan is the CEO of Spark Hire, which combines a video job board and online interviewing platform to enrich interaction between job seekers and employers. Connect with him and Spark Hire on Facebook and Twitter.
Go here to see the original:
By Josh Tolan | Mashable –
Josh Tolan is the CEO of Spark Hire, which combines a video job board and online interviewing platform to enrich interaction between job seekers and employers. Connect with him and Spark Hire on Facebook and Twitter.
Studying literature at Oxford or finance at the London School of Economics; strolling by the Siene or sunbathing on the Italian Riviera coast — these are all possibilities for the college student studying abroad. Opportunities that will give them experiences that will change their lives and memories that will last a lifetime. But is it worth it to study abroad if it means you’ll be missing out on employment opportunities back home?
[More from Mashable: 5 Startups Using Tech To Do Good]
To put it simply, yes! Many organizations are now using video interviews to hire candidates instead of “old-fashioned” meetings, so take advantage of a remote interview. Teresa Tilles, a recruiter for Fairfax, Virg.-based Balfour Beatty Construction asserts, “Companies recruit at colleges all over the United States for positions everywhere. Students and companies are so computer-savvy and it makes sense, especially if students have to pay their way to an interview or are overseas for a semester but hoping to join the workforce when they return home.”
Here are some things to consider when you’re interviewing remotely. Would you ever do a remote interview while abroad? Let us know in the comments.
[More from Mashable: How to Leverage Applicant Tracking Systems To Land a Job]
Advantages
As Tilles says, “It is often cheaper to record our interviews rather than fly the candidates in, put them up in hotels, add car rentals and meals. And vice versa, if candidates have to incur the expense to attend an interview/career fair, this is often easier on the wallet.”
Another advantage of a video interview is that it makes it possible for both parties (the interviewer and the interviewee) to accommodate their schedules. The company decides what questions to ask the job seekers and puts them in the interview package. And when it’s convenient for the applicant, he or she can open up the video interview module, record responses and submit them.
Are They Effective?
While meeting an employer in-person is the most effective way to make a first impression, video interviews are an adequate way to interface because it still promotes face-time. “It truly feels like an on-site interview, you can see the person, see their body language and see their professionalism,” says Tilles.
Jennifer Flaa, the CEO of media training company Vettanna ToGo, agrees. She explained that although video interviews are new to the hiring process, the fundamentals of interviewing are the same. Poor body language and careless presentation can ruin a video interview as easily as they can derail a face-to-face conversation.
According to Flaa, you need to be yourself because you still want to project an authentic representation of you, a potential employee.
“Being self-conscious is your number one enemy,” she explains. “It makes you nervous and it makes you act fake. Think about the questions, think about the other person, or imagine you are talking to a good friend who is nodding and agreeing with everything you say.”
Candidates Can Breathe Easy
Even while abroad, jobseekers can have faith they won’t be forgotten about. By utilizing key features such as recording answers to screening questions and creating a profile video, candidates can provide interested companies with a concrete and accessible video they can easily share and keep in place for future open positions.
Wave of the Future? Perhaps
“We just started a $1 billion project in Utah and interviewed students from George Mason University here in Fairfax a few months ago,” says Tilles. “They met with our on-site human resources director and our company president, then we continued the interview via recordings with the vice president in Utah. He hired two students who interviewed this way and they start this summer.”
If you’re debating giving up the undeniable opportunities you will have to enrich your life by studying abroad so that you won’t end up the last one in your class hired, end your internal argument and go. After all, can you think of a better way to job hunt then turning on your laptop while sitting at a café in Paris, eating a croissant in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower?
Social Media Job Listings
Every week we post a list of social media and web job opportunities. While we publish a huge range of job listings, we’ve selected some of the top social media job opportunities from the past two weeks to get you started. Happy hunting!
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, TommL
This story originally published on Mashable here.
Students Studying Abroad: Take Advantage of Video Job Interviews
April 29, 2012
By Josh Tolan | Mashable – Josh Tolan is the CEO of Spark Hire, which combines a video job board and online interviewing platform to enrich interaction between job seekers and employers. Connect with him and Spark Hire on Facebook and Twitter.
Continued here:
By Josh Tolan | Mashable –
Josh Tolan is the CEO of Spark Hire, which combines a video job board and online interviewing platform to enrich interaction between job seekers and employers. Connect with him and Spark Hire on Facebook and Twitter.
Studying literature at Oxford or finance at the London School of Economics; strolling by the Siene or sunbathing on the Italian Riviera coast — these are all possibilities for the college student studying abroad. Opportunities that will give them experiences that will change their lives and memories that will last a lifetime. But is it worth it to study abroad if it means you’ll be missing out on employment opportunities back home?
[More from Mashable: 5 Startups Using Tech To Do Good]
To put it simply, yes! Many organizations are now using video interviews to hire candidates instead of “old-fashioned” meetings, so take advantage of a remote interview. Teresa Tilles, a recruiter for Fairfax, Virg.-based Balfour Beatty Construction asserts, “Companies recruit at colleges all over the United States for positions everywhere. Students and companies are so computer-savvy and it makes sense, especially if students have to pay their way to an interview or are overseas for a semester but hoping to join the workforce when they return home.”
Here are some things to consider when you’re interviewing remotely. Would you ever do a remote interview while abroad? Let us know in the comments.
[More from Mashable: How to Leverage Applicant Tracking Systems To Land a Job]
Advantages
As Tilles says, “It is often cheaper to record our interviews rather than fly the candidates in, put them up in hotels, add car rentals and meals. And vice versa, if candidates have to incur the expense to attend an interview/career fair, this is often easier on the wallet.”
Another advantage of a video interview is that it makes it possible for both parties (the interviewer and the interviewee) to accommodate their schedules. The company decides what questions to ask the job seekers and puts them in the interview package. And when it’s convenient for the applicant, he or she can open up the video interview module, record responses and submit them.
Are They Effective?
While meeting an employer in-person is the most effective way to make a first impression, video interviews are an adequate way to interface because it still promotes face-time. “It truly feels like an on-site interview, you can see the person, see their body language and see their professionalism,” says Tilles.
Jennifer Flaa, the CEO of media training company Vettanna ToGo, agrees. She explained that although video interviews are new to the hiring process, the fundamentals of interviewing are the same. Poor body language and careless presentation can ruin a video interview as easily as they can derail a face-to-face conversation.
According to Flaa, you need to be yourself because you still want to project an authentic representation of you, a potential employee.
“Being self-conscious is your number one enemy,” she explains. “It makes you nervous and it makes you act fake. Think about the questions, think about the other person, or imagine you are talking to a good friend who is nodding and agreeing with everything you say.”
Candidates Can Breathe Easy
Even while abroad, jobseekers can have faith they won’t be forgotten about. By utilizing key features such as recording answers to screening questions and creating a profile video, candidates can provide interested companies with a concrete and accessible video they can easily share and keep in place for future open positions.
Wave of the Future? Perhaps
“We just started a $1 billion project in Utah and interviewed students from George Mason University here in Fairfax a few months ago,” says Tilles. “They met with our on-site human resources director and our company president, then we continued the interview via recordings with the vice president in Utah. He hired two students who interviewed this way and they start this summer.”
If you’re debating giving up the undeniable opportunities you will have to enrich your life by studying abroad so that you won’t end up the last one in your class hired, end your internal argument and go. After all, can you think of a better way to job hunt then turning on your laptop while sitting at a café in Paris, eating a croissant in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower?
Social Media Job Listings
Every week we post a list of social media and web job opportunities. While we publish a huge range of job listings, we’ve selected some of the top social media job opportunities from the past two weeks to get you started. Happy hunting!
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, TommL
This story originally published on Mashable here.
Amazon Kindle Fire makes up half of all Android tablets sold in the U.S.
April 27, 2012
By Tecca | Today in Tech – The tablet has a heavily modified Android user interface and doesn’t even use Google Play as its default app s … We all know that when it comes to tablets, it’s the iPad that’s been smashing sales records since the first generation came out in 2010.
Originally posted here:
By Tecca | Today in Tech –
The tablet has a heavily modified Android user interface and doesn’t even use Google Play as its default app s …
We all know that when it comes to tablets, it’s the iPad that’s been smashing sales records since the first generation came out in 2010. But if you only take Android tablets into account, then it’s the Amazon Kindle Fire that’s king. According to business analytics firm comScore, the Kindle Fire makes up 54.4% of all Android tablets in the United States as of February 2012.
There’s a large number of other Android tablets competing with the Kindle Fire for a their own piece of the pie. The Samsung Galaxy Tab family only makes up 15.4% of the market in spite of all the available versions for sale. The first Android Honeycomb tablet, the Motorola Xoom, has a measly 7% share; the precursor of the Transformer Prime Ice Cream Sandwich tablet, the Asus Transformer, makes up 6.3%; and Sony’s Tablet S has a measly 0.7% share.
The funny thing is that the best-selling Android tablet uses a heavily modified platform that bares little resemblance to the original Android operating system. And there was a time when you couldn’t surf Google Play on the Kindle Fire even if you were using a browser. While you can now access Google’s own app market from the Kindle Fire, the tablet’s default is still the Amazon App Store.
The firm didn’t analyze the reason behind those numbers, but it’s easy to see why the Kindle Fire has been selling so well: Amazon’s aggressive $199 pricing clearly continues to win over customers. And for those who want a tablet mainly for reading ebooks or for streaming Amazon Prime content, the Kindle Fire is the obvious choice. Of course, this may all change if and when Google releases an official tablet, but we’ll just have to wait and see.
ComScore via Electronista
This article was written by Mariella Moon and originally appeared on Tecca
More from Tecca:
Google online translation tops 200 mln users
April 27, 2012
AFP Relax News – Google Translate marked its sixth birthday on Thursday with news that more than 200 million people use the free online translation service monthly.
See more here:
AFP Relax News –
Google Translate marked its sixth birthday on Thursday with news that more than 200 million people use the free online translation service monthly.
“In a given day we translate roughly as much text as you’d find in one million books,” Google Translate engineer Franz Och said in a blog post.
“We imagine a future where anyone in the world can consume and share any information, no matter what language it’s in, and no matter where it pops up.”
Och worked at US military research arm DARPA before joining California-based Google in 2003 to be part of a team of engineers ramping up the quality of computer-driven language translations.
Google Translate, which lets people paste or type text in an on-screen box to have it quickly converted into a language of their choice, rolled out in 2006 with English, Chinese and Arabic.
“We can now translate among any of 64 different languages, including many with a small Web presence, such as Bengali, Basque, Swahili, Yiddish… and even Esperanto,” Och said of the service at translate.google.com.
Traffic to Translate from smartphones has been growing exponentially, and more than 92 percent of the users are from outside the United States, according to Google.
“What all the professional human translators in the world produce in a year, our system translates in roughly a single day,” Och said.
“By this estimate, most of the translation on the planet is now done by Google Translate.”
Hundreds of thousands may lose Internet in July
April 20, 2012
By LOLITA C. BALDOR | Associated Press – WASHINGTON (AP) — For computer users, a few mouse clicks could mean the difference between staying online and losing Internet connections this summer
Read more:
By LOLITA C. BALDOR | Associated Press –
WASHINGTON (AP) — For computer users, a few mouse clicks could mean the difference between staying online and losing Internet connections this summer.
Unknown to most of them, their problem began when international hackers ran an online advertising scam to take control of infected computers around the world. In a highly unusual response, the FBI set up a safety net months ago using government computers to prevent Internet disruptions for those infected users. But that system is to be shut down.
The FBI is encouraging users to visit a website run by its security partner, http://www.dcwg.org , that will inform them whether they’re infected and explain how to fix the problem. After July 9, infected users won’t be able to connect to the Internet.
Most victims don’t even know their computers have been infected, although the malicious software probably has slowed their web surfing and disabled their antivirus software, making their machines more vulnerable to other problems.
Last November, the FBI and other authorities were preparing to take down a hacker ring that had been running an Internet ad scam on a massive network of infected computers.
“We started to realize that we might have a little bit of a problem on our hands because … if we just pulled the plug on their criminal infrastructure and threw everybody in jail, the victims of this were going to be without Internet service,” said Tom Grasso, an FBI supervisory special agent. “The average user would open up Internet Explorer and get ‘page not found’ and think the Internet is broken.”
On the night of the arrests, the agency brought in Paul Vixie, chairman and founder of Internet Systems Consortium, to install two Internet servers to take the place of the truckload of impounded rogue servers that infected computers were using. Federal officials planned to keep their servers online until March, giving everyone opportunity to clean their computers. But it wasn’t enough time. A federal judge in New York extended the deadline until July.
Now, said Grasso, “the full court press is on to get people to address this problem.” And it’s up to computer users to check their PCs.
This is what happened:
Hackers infected a network of probably more than 570,000 computers worldwide. They took advantage of vulnerabilities in the Microsoft Windows operating system to install malicious software on the victim computers. This turned off antivirus updates and changed the way the computers reconcile website addresses behind the scenes on the Internet’s domain name system.
The DNS system is a network of servers that translates a web address — such as www.ap.org — into the numerical addresses that computers use. Victim computers were reprogrammed to use rogue DNS servers owned by the attackers. This allowed the attackers to redirect computers to fraudulent versions of any website.
The hackers earned profits from advertisements that appeared on websites that victims were tricked into visiting. The scam netted the hackers at least $14 million, according to the FBI. It also made thousands of computers reliant on the rogue servers for their Internet browsing.
When the FBI and others arrested six Estonians last November, the agency replaced the rogue servers with Vixie’s clean ones. Installing and running the two substitute servers for eight months is costing the federal government about $87,000.
The number of victims is hard to pinpoint, but the FBI believes that on the day of the arrests, at least 568,000 unique Internet addresses were using the rogue servers. Five months later, FBI estimates that the number is down to at least 360,000. The U.S. has the most, about 85,000, federal authorities said. Other countries with more than 20,000 each include Italy, India, England and Germany. Smaller numbers are online in Spain, France, Canada, China and Mexico.
Vixie said most of the victims are probably individual home users, rather than corporations that have technology staffs who routinely check the computers.
FBI officials said they organized an unusual system to avoid any appearance of government intrusion into the Internet or private computers. And while this is the first time the FBI used it, it won’t be the last.
“This is the future of what we will be doing,” said Eric Strom, a unit chief in the FBI’s Cyber Division. “Until there is a change in legal system, both inside and outside the United States, to get up to speed with the cyber problem, we will have to go down these paths, trail-blazing if you will, on these types of investigations.”
Now, he said, every time the agency gets near the end of a cyber case, “we get to the point where we say, how are we going to do this, how are we going to clean the system” without creating a bigger mess than before.
___
Online:
To check and clean computers: http://www.dcwg.org
___
Lolita C. Baldor can be followed on Twitter at http://twitter.com/lbaldor
British Brothers Charged in Stock-Robot Swindle
April 20, 2012
WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. investors thought they were buying access to a stock-picking robot named “Marl.” Instead, they paid millions to teenage twin brothers in England who now face civil fraud charges for an alleged penny-stock swindle. The robot didn’t exist
See the original post:
WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. investors thought they were buying access to a stock-picking robot named “Marl.” Instead, they paid millions to teenage twin brothers in England who now face civil fraud charges for an alleged penny-stock swindle.
The robot didn’t exist.
The stocks picked were companies that paid hefty fees to Alexander and Thomas Hunter, just 16 when the alleged scheme began in 2007, the Securities and Exchange Commission said Friday. As stock prices jumped, the Hunters’ clients dumped their shares for a profit.
“While touting their supposed breakthrough investment technology on two websites, the Hunters were racking up fees as stock promoters through a third,” said Thomas Sporkin, chief of the SEC’s office of market intelligence, in a statement.
The SEC filed a civil suit against the Hunters, who are now 20, in U.S. District Court in Manhattan Friday.
Officials are asking the court to block the twins from the securities industry and order them to return the money they collected from investors. They are also seeking additional financial penalties.
It all began with a website called daytradingrobot.com, according to a narrative sketched out by the SEC.
The Hunters drew roughly 75,000 investors, who were promised stock tips generated by a sophisticated program. The investors, most of them in the United States, paid at least $1.2 million for newsletters revealing the robot’s insights and a “home version” of the robot software.
“The longer Marl is allowed to run on a computer … The More Advanced He Becomes!” one of the Hunters’ websites crowed, according to the SEC complaint. The Marl “home version” cost an additional $97. For that, investors got a program that grabbed ticker symbols fed in by the Hunters.
The twins collected an additional $1.9 million from companies seeking Marl’s endorsement, the SEC said. On the site equitypromoter.com, Thomas Hunter wrote that his websites attracted thousands of visitors each day, many of whom followed his investing recommendations.
“One email to this list of people rockets a stock price,” the website said, according to the SEC complaint.
In 2008, after they promoted a music publishing company called UOMO Media Inc., its share price doubled to 69 cents. Another round of promotion in 2009 lifted UOMO’s stock to $1.06. UOMO has not traded above a penny since September 2010.
For another promotion, Alexander Hunter purchased 21,000 shares for 16 cents, pumped the price up to 51 cents and sold the shares for a profit of less than $6,000. He videotaped the trading and used the footage to promote the newsletter, the SEC said.
Marl, the fictional robot’s name, was a combination of the names of its supposed creators: Michael Cohen and Carl Williamson. The Hunters claimed that Cohen had developed a Goldman Sachs trading model that generated more than $4 billion in annual trading profits.
Goldman never employed a Michael Cohen for that kind of work, the SEC said.
The Hunters’ skills apparently did not include computer programming. In 2007, they advertised for programmers who could make “a small software program which will appear to the user that once running it is analyzing thousands of penny stocks,” according to the SEC’s complaint.
In a note marked “IMPORTANT,” they added: “This software does not actually find stocks at all. . . . Basically this is almost a ‘fake’ piece of software and needs to simply appear advanced.”
___
Daniel Wagner can be reached at www.twitter.com/wagnerreports .
OTC Stock Review Issues Report on Roadships Holdings, Inc.
April 16, 2012
ATLANTA, April 16, 2012 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — OTC Stock Review announces that it has initiated coverage of Roadships Holdings, Inc., an emerging short-sea and ground freight company operating through its wholly owned subsidiaries in the U.S. and Australia. In our opinion, Roadships Holdings, Inc
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ATLANTA, April 16, 2012 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — OTC Stock Review announces that it has initiated coverage of Roadships Holdings, Inc., an emerging short-sea and ground freight company operating through its wholly owned subsidiaries in the U.S. and Australia. In our opinion, Roadships Holdings, Inc. management has positioned the Company to be in the right industry at the right time. We are also impressed by the fact that Roadships Holdings, Inc. is diversified geographically by operating in both the US and Australia.
Roadships Holdings, Inc. has acquired several domestic and foreign subsidiaries to facilitate its entry into US and Australian markets. In the United States, Roadships Acquisitions US, Inc. is the subsidiary designated to identify and act upon synergistic acquisition targets in North America. Roadships Holdings, Inc. was established to develop and accommodate organic growth within the North American markets.
The complete report is available at http://www.otcstockreview.com/RDSH_review.pdf. You can also visit Roadships Holdings’ web site at http://www.roadships.us.
OTC Stock Review provides a comprehensive review of financial market coverage, specifically the microcap market, by newsletters, mutual funds, brokerage firm and independent research firms. OTC Stock Review defines the microcap segment of the equity market as companies with less than $250 million in market capitalization. Members receive regular emails of stock opinions and market coverage, including both global and domestic. Please visit http://www.otcstockreview.com.
NOTE: The purpose of this release is to introduce the reader to OTCStockReview.com and Roadship Holdings, Inc. OTC Stock Review is not a Registered Investment Advisor or a Broker/Dealer. Information and opinions presented in this release are solely for informative purposes and not intended, nor should they be construed as, investment advice. This document contains information obtained from public sources about Roadship Holdings, Inc., but does not contain all the relevant material information necessary to evaluate the company. This release is not to be considered an offer to buy, sell, hold, and/or otherwise trade in the securities of Roadship Holdings, Inc., as profiled. OTC Stock Review has not been compensated to perform investor relations services for Roadship Holdings, Inc., but might be in the future. Officers, directors, and employees of OTC Stock Review, may hold a long or short equity position of a profiled Company and may trade in these securities for their own accounts. Carefully review profiled companies with your investment advisor, stockbroker, or other such professional. OTC Stock Review is not liable for any investment decisions by its readers or their advisors. Any analysis contained herein does not purport to be a complete analysis of the profiled companies. Readers are encouraged to obtain copies of the profiled Company’s periodic reports filed with United States Securities and Exchange Commission, which are generally available at http://www.sec.gov. You can view our complete disclaimer at http://www.otcstockreview.com/disclaimer.htm
Wall Street embraces Gap as sales beat estimates
April 13, 2012
Wall Street loves Gap Inc. Again. The largest U.S
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Wall Street loves Gap Inc. Again.
The largest U.S. apparel chain has surged 37 percent to $25.48 this year through Wednesday and on March 26 hit a 10-year closing high. Analysts are raising their price targets to levels – $28 and higher – not seen since one of the best-performing companies of the 1990s began to lose its footing in 2001.
The euphoria is being driven in part by February and March same-store sales that beat analysts’ estimates and were the best back-to-back results since 2010. After shunning Gap for the likes of Hennes & Mauritz AB and Forever 21 Inc., U.S. consumers have been snapping up brightly colored denim at Gap’s namesake stores and 1960s-inspired dresses from Banana Republic’s “Mad Men” collection. Items from the chain’s Diane von Furstenberg children’s collection are popping up on eBay for about twice the original retail price.
Even analysts who earlier this year were less bullish on Gap have changed their tune. Two months of robust same-store sales will compel more people to “join in the positive chorus” on Gap, Dorothy Lakner, of Caris & Co. in New York, wrote in a April 5 note. For the first time since May, she has changed her recommendation to “above average,” raising her price target to $32 from $27.
The big question is whether Gap’s gains are sustainable, said Dave Weiner, an analyst at Deutsche Bank AG.
“It’s too early to say,” Weiner said. “What the brand needs to do is prove it can sell product at full price. They are still a very promotional brand.”
A measure of Gap’s revenue per product is up this year, driven by “improved customer response to women’s assortment, especially at Gap and Banana Republic, which has translated to fewer promotions and markdowns,” Edie Kissko, a company spokeswoman.
Gap’s gains come as Americans continue to spend judiciously. U.S. same-store sales rose 3.9 percent last month, beating the estimate for a 3.3 percent gain, as many chains used discounts to woo shoppers. Though Gap sales climbed 8 percent, unseasonably warm weather and an early Easter may have prompted shoppers to stock up early on spring gear.
When Glenn Murphy, 50, became Gap’s chief executive officer in 2007, he focused on international and online sales while shrinking or closing stores at home. Since 2007, sales in the United States and Canada have fallen 6.6 percent, and some investors began looking overseas for growth. In the past 12 months, Murphy has been re-emphasizing North America, which last year generated 85 percent of the company’s $14.5 billion in revenue.
Sapna Maheshwari is a Bloomberg writer. sapnam@bloomberg.net
This article appeared on page D – 6 of the San Francisco Chronicle
