Consistent with the evolution of Sears (SHLD) the company is endeavoring to license three of their key brands to other products and retailers.  Kenmore, Craftsman, and Diehard will be sold at other stores and the brand names can be licensed for other products.  While their exclusivity drove traffic to Sears, the return on invested capital...Read More

Bill Ngyren is a respected value investor who manages in excess of $10 billion in the Oakmark Fund.  In this interview he discusses the attractiveness of financials and stocks that are buying back stock at discounts to intrinsic value.  Some of the stocks that they own are JPM, COF, WFC, AAPL, KSS, NOC, and DTV....Read More

Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson is making the tough decisions that must be made if efforts to turnaround Yahoo are going to be successful.  Yahoo is a company with excellent assets but no growth in their core businesses of display advertising and search.  I’m anxious to learn more about Thompson’s plan to more effectively grow revenues....Read More

The fight between Netflix and other strong competitors in the streaming video market continues to intensify with Amazon now able to offer their films through the Sony Playstation. While Netflix did have competitive advantages in the distribution of dvd’s business, they have far less in the streaming video business.  Higher programming costs and increased competition...Read More

While Apple’s valuation is far cheaper than what we saw during the tech bubble, this type of constant one-upmanship on who can give the company a higher target price is very similar to that era.  A stock move to a one trillion dollar market cap is not unbelievable from these current lofty levels, but it...Read More

Groupon (GRPN) continues to be one of the truly confounding IPO’s that have come out over the last few years.  From the very beginning they have been extremely aggressive in their accounting methods which is simply not necessary if you have a great business.  Groupon rushed into an IPO and they did everything they could...Read More

While Blackberry (RIMM) has certainly been under the gun of late, the company still has a very loyal user base.  For people that use their phone primarily for business needs Blackberry offers the best combination of productivity and security.  The company is behind the curved by waiting so long to their new line of Blackberry...Read More

Say what you what about Goldman Sachs but they are not stupid people and they understand the housing and mortgage markets.  Inventories are down and when demand picks up watch out. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-29/goldman-bets-on-property-rebound-with-new-fund-mortgages.html INVESTING IN THE FINANCIAL MARKETS INVOLVES RISKS. OPTIONS ARE NOT SUITABLE FOR ALL INVESTORS.Read More

This is very encouraging news to see Spain taking their budget cuts seriously.  While austerity isn’t going to be a magic potion to resolve the Euro’s problems, it does maintain the credibility of the efforts made in the last year for each country to get their houses in order.  The last couple of years Greece...Read More

I’d expect a tremendous amount of competition but if China is indeed opening up their domestic auto insurance market the potential benefits can be huge.  If I were in the auto insurance in business I’d copy Geico’s model which has been so successful in the United States as much as possible.  The low cost operator...Read More