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Herbalife Responds: Ackman Should Be Investigated, Not Us $hlf

2013-03-13T11:24:00.000-04:00

Herbalife Responds: Ackman Should Be Investigated, Not Us

If anything, Ackman, should be investigated, Herbalife says. Here’s the statement from the company:

“We regret that the National Consumers League has permitted itself to be the mechanism by which Pershing Square continues its attack on Herbalife. If anything, it is Pershing Square that should be investigated by appropriate authorities. Its actions are motivated by a reckless $1 billion bet against the company based on knowingly false statements about Herbalife. Those statements unquestionably cause harm to our consumers and investors and indeed all consumers and investors.

“Herbalife is committed to providing consumers with high quality products that address a real need: weight management and nutrition. Our consumer-protection rules not only meet, but in many cases exceed the standards prescribed by the Direct Selling Association (DSA). Herbalife is a long-time member in good standing of the DSA, which has 182 member companies, including Avon, Amway, Nu Skin, Primerica and The Pampered Chef (aBerkshire Hathaway BRKB +0.20% company).

“Herbalife is a financially strong and successful company, having created meaningful value for shareholders, significant opportunities for distributors and positively impacted the lives and health of its consumers over the company’s 33-year history.”

LATEST GLOOMY APPLE ANALYSIS PROJECTS 25% CHANCE OF GUIDANCE MISS

2013-03-12T11:11:00.004-04:00

LATEST GLOOMY APPLE ANALYSIS PROJECTS 25% CHANCE OF GUIDANCE MISS $aapl

It used to be that Apple (AAPL) would intentionally low-ball its quarterly guidance so it could crush expectations with better-than-expected earnings. But now that Apple has started issuing more realistic guidance, it’s running the risk of missing expectations by a considerable margin. And according to a new estimate from Jefferies & Company analyst Peter Misek, there’s a significant chance that Apple’s earnings might be even worse than its own projections this quarter. Per StreetInsider, Misek released a new research note on Tuesday that not only slashed the company’s price target from $500 to $420, but also projected a 25% chance that Apple would miss its own guidance for the fiscal second quarter.

Illinois Settles With SEC For Misleading Muni Investors — State Had Failed To Properly Disclose Underfunded Pension

2013-03-12T06:43:00.000-04:00

Illinois Settles With SEC For Misleading Muni Investors — State Had Failed To Properly Disclose Underfunded Pension

$gld Gold Sales From Soros Reveal 12-Year Bull Run Decay: Commodities

2013-03-12T06:22:00.002-04:00

$gld Gold Sales From Soros Reveal 12-Year Bull Run Decay: Commodities

Gold’s worst start to a year in a quarter century and the biggest sales by investors on record are increasing concern that bullion’s longest rally since the end of World War I is ending.

Investors sold 106.2 metric tons valued at $5.4 billion from exchange-traded products in February, the most since their creation in 2003, data compiled by Bloomberg show. Another 26.1 tons was cut since then. Credit Suisse Group AG and Barclays Plc say the 12-year rally will peak in 2013 and billionaire George Soros reduced his stake in the biggest ETP by 55 percent in the last quarter. Prices are within 4 percent of a bear market after the longest run of monthly losses since 1997.

Europe Threat to Rally Remains: Godfrey $epv

2013-03-11T13:20:00.002-04:00

Europe Threat to Rally Remains: Godfrey $epv

Samsung Aims To Bake Apple With New Mobile Devices

2013-03-11T13:15:00.002-04:00

Samsung Aims To Bake Apple With New Mobile Devices $aapl #samsung

Samsung is turning up the heat on Apple (AAPL), announcing a direct competitor to the iPad Mini and making plans to debut its next-generation smartphone on Apple's home turf.

The South Korean consumer electronics giant has become increasing bold since it took the global lead in smartphone sales from Apple's iPhone with its Galaxy handsets last year.

Samsung on Sunday introduced an 8-inch tablet that competes with Apple's 7.9-inch iPad Mini. Samsung's Galaxy Note 8.0 includes a stylus, runs Google's (GOOG) Android software and is capable of showing multiple apps on the screen at the same time, the company said. And unlike the iPad Mini, the Galaxy Note 8.0 can double as a phone. The device will be available in the second quarter.

Will J.C. Penney Survive? $jcp #hbs #harvard #harvardreview

2013-03-11T11:19:00.002-04:00

Will J.C. Penney Survive? $jcp #hbs #harvard #harvardreview

This week J.C. Penney released its fourth quarter earnings results and they were dismal. Comparable store sales nosedived by 31.7% in the fourth quarter of 2012 versus the prior year. Internet revenue sank by 34.4%, and gross margin dropped from 30.2% to 23.8%.

What's causing this financial Armageddon? The sole culprit is J.C. Penney's new "Fair and Square Every Day" low pricing strategy. In January 2012, Ron Johnson, Penney's CEO, announced that instead of offering weekly sales, the retailer was reducing prices across the board. Johnson's pitch to consumers was in essence, "Why wait for a sale? We have low prices all of the time." To be clear, Johnson was not claiming that Penney's everyday prices are the lowest, simply "fair."

York's Dinan squares off against Ackman over JC Penney $JCP $HLF

2013-03-11T09:03:00.002-04:00

York's Dinan squares off against Ackman over JC Penney $JCP $HLF

Hedge fund manager James Dinan is wagering that ailing retailer JC Penney Corp will continue to perform poorly and in the process he is taking on the company's biggest bull, billionaire investor William Ackman.

Dinan, who heads York Capital Management which manages $15.1 billion, this week told an audience at a Morgan Stanley investing conference in New York that the firm is shorting JC Penney's debt, effectively taking a dim view of its future.

Recipe for Divided Europe: Add Horse, Then Stir #EU $EPV

2013-03-11T06:58:00.002-04:00

Recipe for Divided Europe: Add Horse, Then Stir #EU $EPV

RT @JeffMacke: Intrade freezes assets. It's just like MFGlobal except Intrade execs will get prosecuted

2013-03-11T06:54:00.001-04:00

RT @JeffMacke: Intrade freezes assets. It's just like MFGlobal except Intrade execs will get prosecuted http://

Intrade Has Been Shut Down

2013-03-11T06:39:00.002-04:00

Intrade Has Been Shut Down

Where banks really make money on IPOs #ipo $fb $gs $ms

2013-03-11T06:14:00.000-04:00

Where banks really make money on IPOs #ipo

Rigging the I.P.O. Game #NYT #etoys

The plaintiffs charge that Goldman Sachs had a fiduciary duty to maximize eToys’ take from the I.P.O. Instead, Goldman purposely set an artificially low price, so that its real clients, the institutional investors clamoring for the stock, could pocket that first-day run-up. According to the suit, Goldman then demanded that some of those easy profits be kicked back to the firm. Part of their evidence for the calculated underpricing of eToys, according to the plaintiffs’ complaint, was that Lawton Fitt, the Goldman executive who headed the underwriting team and was thus best positioned to gauge the market demand, actually made a bet with several of her colleagues that the price would hit $80 at the opening. (Through a Goldman Sachs spokesman, Fitt declined to comment. Goldman denies that it did anything wrong, about which more shortly.)

On some level, this argument — between those who believe companies are routinely sold down the river by their underwriters and those who insist that underwriting requires a complex balancing of the interests of both company and investors — has been going on ever since. Just a couple of years ago when the social media company LinkedIn went public and the stock quickly doubled, I wrote that the company had been scammed by its underwriters, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America’s Merrill Lynch unit. Money that rightly belonged to the company had instead gone to investment clients, I argued. A number of market observers responded by saying that I lacked a nuanced understanding of the complicated dynamics between companies, investors and underwriters.

Recently, however, I came across a cache of documents related to the eToys litigation that seem to tilt the argument in favor of the skeptics. Although the documents were supposed to be under seal, they were sitting in a file at the New York County Clerk’s Office, available to anyone who asked for them. I asked.

What they clearly show is that Goldman knew exactly what it was doing when it underpriced the eToys I.P.O. — and many others as well. (According to the lawsuit, Fitt led around a dozen underwritings in 1999, several of which were also woefully underpriced.) Taken in their entirety, the e-mails and internal reports show Goldman took advantage of naïve Internet start-ups to fatten its own bottom line.

Goldman carefully calculated the first-day gains reaped by its investment clients. After compiling the numbers in something it called a trade-up report, the Goldman sales force would call on clients, show them how much they had made from Goldman’s I.P.O.’s and demand that they reward Goldman with increased business. It was not unusual for Goldman sales representatives to ask that 30 to 50 percent of the first-day profits be returned to Goldman via commissions, according to depositions given in the case.

According to data compiled by the plaintiffs, Capstar Holding, an investing client, made a series of pointless trades solely for Goldman’s benefit. The lawsuit quotes an investment manager at the firm, Christopher Rule, as saying that 70 percent of his trading activity in May 1999 was done to generate commissions for Goldman, “pursuant to an ‘understanding’ with his Goldman broker that he needed to generate money for Goldman in order to receive I.P.O.’s.”

Italy’s government bonds fell for a second day after Fitch Ratings cut the nation’s credit rating, saying inconclusive elections threatened the country’s ability to respond to the recession. $epv $spy

2013-03-11T05:17:00.002-04:00

Italy’s government bonds fell for a second day after Fitch Ratings cut the nation’s credit rating, saying inconclusive elections threatened the country’s ability to respond to the recession. $epv $spy

Bernanke Provokes Mystery Over Fed Stimulus Exit $c $gs $ms $bac $bcs $wfc

2013-03-11T05:12:00.003-04:00

Bernanke Provokes Mystery Over Fed Stimulus Exit

Twitter, Social Media, Stocktwits Are Fertile Ground for Stock Hoaxes

2013-03-11T04:49:00.000-04:00

Twitter, Social Media, (ie Stocktwits) Are Fertile Ground for Stock Hoaxes

Twitter and StockTwits have stronger filters - the Einhorn impersonator's account was suspended shortly after the misleading post - but the spigot of false information cannot be shut entirely.

StockTwits doesn't allow discussions of penny stocks "since those are the ones that are the most vulnerable to being pushed around," said Howard Lindzon, the company's San Diego-based chief executive.

In the two decades through December, the average return of all investors in U.S. stock mutual funds was an annualized 4.25% vs 8.2% for the S&P 500

2013-03-11T04:00:00.002-04:00

In the two decades through December, the average return of all investors in U.S. stock mutual funds was an annualized 4.25% vs 8.2% for the S&P 500 $spy

Did Pandora’s CEO Just Pull a George Costanza?

2013-03-11T03:49:00.000-04:00

Did Pandora’s CEO Just Pull a George Costanza? $p

George Costanza from the timeless-sitcom Seinfeld was known for some fine exits. Over the course of several occupation changes, he finally figures out that leaving on a high-note can have a positive impact on someone.

'BearHunter Ben' Making Risk Into Rewards $HLF $VRNG

2013-03-10T17:49:00.002-04:00

'BearHunter Ben' Making Risk Into Rewards $HLF $VRNG

Amid Unemployment Numbers, Faces Of Those Who've Lost Hope #NPR

2013-03-09T19:38:00.000-05:00

Amid Unemployment Numbers, Faces Of Those Who've Lost Hope

"At the same time, there are millions of Americans you can't find in monthly job reports. They've been unemployed so long they're no longer counted, or they're working just a few hours a week in jobs that can't support them. The Bureau of Labor Statistics also said yesterday that what they call the labor force participation rate fell again to 63.5 percent, the lowest number since 1981."

#Dilbert 'Victimless Crime' #Insider-Trading

2013-03-09T15:57:00.001-05:00

Major Grocer to Label Foods With Gene-Modified Content

2013-03-09T05:13:00.000-05:00

Major Grocer to Label Foods With Gene-Modified Content

"Whole Foods Market, the grocery chain, on Friday became the first retailer in the United States to require labeling of all genetically modified foods sold in its stores, a move that some experts said could radically alter the food industry.

A. C. Gallo, president of Whole Foods, said the new labeling requirement, to be in place within five years, came in response to consumer demand. “We’ve seen how our customers have responded to the products we do have labeled,” Mr. Gallo said. “Some of our manufacturers say they’ve seen a 15 percent increase in sales of products they have labeled.”

Genetically modified ingredients are deeply embedded in the global food supply, having proliferated since the 1990s. Most of the corn and soybeans grown in the United States, for example, have been genetically modified."

First Bitcoin Hedge Fund Launches From Malta

2013-03-08T19:51:00.000-05:00

First Bitcoin Hedge Fund Launches From Malta

"Ever since the bitcoin cryptocurrency first launched and achieved initial success, institutional investors and hedge fund managers have secretly sought a regulated investment vehicle for bitcoin placements. Malta-based Exante Ltd. has the solution with their new Bitcoin Fund.

“I hope our fund will be the first hedge fund to take advantage of using bitcoins,” explains Managing Partner Anatoliy Knyazev. Exante actually announced the fund in October last year, but they did not make a serious effort to market it. Now, with more institutional interest emerging, they agreed to provide this update to Forbes.

Although any person or entity can acquire and store bitcoins on their own, institutional investors are typically restricted in the types of assets available within their investment charter. Similar to a mutual fund or hedge fund for alternative assets, Exante’s Bitcoin Fund permits institutions and high-net worth individuals to access the vibrant bitcoin market with a licensed product and this alone is an innovative development."

Employers add a stunning 236,000 jobs in Feb.

2013-03-08T19:40:00.002-05:00

Employers add a stunning 236,000 jobs in Feb.

Fancy Footwear and Austerity Won’t Save Portugal #EX $EPV

2013-03-08T11:13:00.002-05:00

Fancy Footwear and Austerity Won’t Save Portugal

Vermillion Management Discusses Q4 2012 Results - Earnings Call Transcript

2013-03-08T10:51:00.002-05:00

Vermillion Management Discusses Q4 2012 Results - Earnings Call Transcript