The WSJ.com ASIALINKS alert excerpts a piece on earnings guidance, which contains interesting statistics:
Between 2001 and 2006, Standard & Poor’s 500 companies that issued guidance beat analysts’ expectations 65% of the time, while companies that didn’t issue guidance beat them 63% of the time, according to a recent report from Thomson Financial.
It can be […]

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Bloomberg has good coverage of former activist fund manager Yoshiaki Murakami’s sentence. Once a Japanese investor hero, now Murakami is mostly remembered for his insider trading and association with destroying individual investor confidence. Smaller cap issues continue to remain out of favor, some trading at ridiculously low valuations. His presence is missed, but in the […]

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The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 14000 for the first time ever Thursday. It took only 58 trading days to make the 1,000 point rise from 13,000 to 14,000, the second fastest on record, after the 23-session rise to 11,000 in spring 1999, says The Wall Street Journal. Keep the following in mind:
Of course, […]

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We were just shopping online and punching in a coupon code … which got us thinking how (1) paper coupons don’t seem to exist in Japan, and (2) even when shopping online, instead of coupon codes for discounts, there’s often a point system instead (the same as often found in-store), which effectively serves the same […]

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Wall Street rallied big on Thursday, led by better-than-expected retail sales figures, especially from Wal-Mart (WMT) in spite of sustained high gasoline prices. That leads us to wonder just how strong the U.S. consumer is and if there is not merely more debt being piled up. The difference between retail in Japan and the U.S., […]

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The Wall Street Journal reported over the weekend that Vanguard will soon offer an ETF tracking the MSCI EAFE index, to trade on the AMEX, with an expense ratio of only 0.15% — less than half the cost of Barclays Global Capital’s iShares offering.
The WSJ also notes the explosive growth at BGI, where its iShares […]

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A WSJ AsiaLinks email alert contained the following figures, explaining briefly where the action is:
Over the past six years, global futures trading on the world’s exchanges has grown nearly 30% a year, expanding the total derivatives market to about $500 trillion — four times the value of all publicly traded stocks and bonds. As a […]

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A recent Economist article, “Give peace a rating” (June 2, 2007), discussed the use of indices measuring “peace” to rank countries. The Economist’s sister co. Economist Intelligence Unit has one, found in the accompanying image (see below) from the article. Japan ranks 5th-highest in the EIU’s index. This is obviously a positive factor in terms […]

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FYI, see the chart below for the latest American Association of Individual Investors [AAII] survey released 6/18, dated 6/14. Note last week’s readings were: Bullish: 33.33%, Neutral: 21.88%, Bearish: 44.79%.

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This is so good we have to post it even though it was reported in the media a few days ago.
By now everybody is talking about the rising yields of bonds and as a result mortgages — definitely not a positive development for an already weak U.S. real estate market perhaps induced and now exacerbated […]

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