Tag: Stocks

Microsoft is one of the world’s oldest and best known technology companies that exist. Microsoft has had to reinvent itself over the years to stay competitive. The person to thank for Microsoft’s success in recent years is no other than Satya Nedella. Satya took over for Steve Ballmer back in 2014. 

Before becoming CEO, Satya was Executive Vice President of Microsoft’s cloud and enterprise group and led the company’s transformation to cloud infrastructure and services, better known as Azure.

Gartner, a global IT research and analytics firm, predicts public cloud services will grow to $206.2 billion in 2019, up 17.3% year over

Zero-sum is a situation in game theory in which one person’s gain is equivalent to another’s loss, so the net change in wealth or benefit is zero. A zero-sum game may have as few as two players, or millions of participants.Zero-sum games are found in game theory, but are less common than non-zero sum games. Poker and gambling are popular examples of zero-sum games since the sum of the amounts won by some players equals the combined losses of the others. Games like chess and tennis, where there is one winner and one loser, are also zero-sum games. In the

I posted about the Banks one week ago,

The Bank Stocks Aren’t Fine

The US Fed held the target for the benchmark rate steady at 2.25% to 2.50%. Fed Powell indicated no rate hikes 2019.  With rates potentially at their peak for this cycle and future GDP projections declining slashed, this recipe could spell trouble for the bank stocks. Typically, financial entities like banks, insurance companies, brokerage firm generally benefit from higher interest rates. Increases in interest rates, mean the economy is doing good. Banks make loans to borrowers at a higher rate than non-performing assets such as savings accounts and

The equity markets are by designed made to go up over time.  The first quarter of 2019 was no exception. The S&P 500 rose 13% (red line) this quarter and had its best start to a year since 1998.  The Dow gained 11% (blue line).  Nasdaq rallied 16% (green line), while the small-caps Russell was up 14% (purple line).

Helping the Nasdaq rally was Apple and Microsoft, both up 20%.

Source

And there is room of Apple to continue to rise to the daily supply at $205.

One of the unlikely winners of the quarter was Xerox, yes, the copier and fax company.

A little less than a year ago, John Schnatter, the founder and former public face of pizza chain Papa John’s stuck his nose in the national anthem protests debate in the NFL, then indirectly blamed the league for Papa John’s slowing sales. Than in during a May conference call in 2018, Schnatter was asked how he would distance himself from racist groups online. He responded by downplaying the significance of his NFL statement. “Colonel Sanders called blacks n—–s,” Schnatter said, before complaining that Sanders never faced public backlash.

A month later John Schnatter appeared in court to testify against the Papa

The Standard & Poor’s 500 index rose 13 percent the first three months of the year, its best quarterly showing in a decade and the strongest first quarter since 1998, according to LPL Financial and FactSet. Here’s the good news: The S&P 500 has gained 10 percent or more in the first quarter 10 previous times since 1950, and in nine cases it has notched further increases the rest of the year that have averaged 5.8 percent, according to LPL and FactSet. Bottom line: LPL projects the S&P 500 will reach a record 3,000 by the end of the

About five years ago, McDonald’s suffered from disappointing sales growth, deteriorating margins and they were losing market share.  It got so bad that analysts were predicting that 2014 will be the first year of negative global same-store sales since 2002.  That’s when Operation Turnaround was implemented in 2015.

McDonalds focused on refranchising to increase the company’s percentage of franchised restaurants.  The refranchising efforts would cut general and administrative cost by $300 and lower capital expenditures because franchised locations would require less investments.  However, the halo effect was refranchising would allow local franchisees to determine specific customer needs and food preferences.  

Than in

Two weeks ago I wrote a post about the auto loan industry imploding,

Carmageddon Is Back On

Serious auto-loan delinquencies – loans that are 90 days or more past due – surged to 4.47% of total auto loan balances in Q4 2018, according to New York Fed data this morning. This put the auto-loan delinquency rate at the highest level since Q1 2012 and just 0.6 percentage points below the peak during the Great Recession in Q1 2011.

At the end of 2018, there were over 7 million Americans with auto loans that were 90+ days past due, 1 million more than at