$17 billion. That’s how much stock market value has been wiped out at Bank of America (NYSE: BAC) in the latest foreclosure mess. JP Morgan Chase (NYSE: JPM) has seen its value shrink by several billion dollars, while Citigroup (NYSE: C) and Wells Fargo… Read More

Look around the room you are in. I guarantee there’s at least a dozen devices powered by electricity, and of those, at least a few are powered by batteries. Batteries — or in more precise terms, energy storage devices — have remained pretty much unchanged… Read More

As Americans were heading back to work from the long Memorial Day weekend, Europeans were fretting about a looming banking crisis that threatened to take down major banks in Ireland and Spain. Europe went on to dodge that bullet, and its equity markets have rebounded +30% in the last five… Read More

From time to time, the banking sector will see a transformative innovation, such as the ATM or online banking. But it often takes time to get consumers to change their habits. Yet when it happens, the results can be a big money maker. This appears to… Read More

It’s time to write the obituary for traditional cell phones. Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) has changed the game with its iPhone, and there are now a raft of other smartphones on the market as well. My favorite play on this theme is Synaptics (Nasdaq: SYNA), which was a… Read More

After a furious two-month rally that has pushed the major indices to yearly highs, it seems to be an appropriate time to look at stocks that have been receiving perhaps too much investor affection. When the market takes a breather, these are often the first stocks to be dumped by momentum investors. So, I ran a screen for stocks that have risen at least +40% in the last three months and sport projected 2011 price-to-earnings (P/E) multiples above 40. There are surely some high-growth names here, but there are also… Read More

After a furious two-month rally that has pushed the major indices to yearly highs, it seems to be an appropriate time to look at stocks that have been receiving perhaps too much investor affection. When the market takes a breather, these are often the first stocks to be dumped by momentum investors. So, I ran a screen for stocks that have risen at least +40% in the last three months and sport projected 2011 price-to-earnings (P/E) multiples above 40. There are surely some high-growth names here, but there are also low-growth stocks that, at least at first glance, don’t merit such a strong move. The logical rebounders Some of these stocks are here simply because they were likely too undervalued earlier in the summer. Back in July, I suggested that Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN), trading at $120, was due for a rally and predicted that “as investors start to once again embrace the company’s robust long-term outlook, shares should eventually power past the $150 mark seen earlier this spring.” With shares now at $170, it’s hard to… Read More

My colleague David Sterman recently wrote a piece about the challenges investors face when they spot a company they would love to own, but the stock is just too darn expensive. [Read Dave’s article here] The basic takeaway is to keep a close eye on the stock in hopes that an opportunity arises to pick it up at a more appealing valuation. About a decade ago, a specialty apparel retailer had a stock that qualified as a small cap and flew under the radar screen of most investors. Read More

My colleague David Sterman recently wrote a piece about the challenges investors face when they spot a company they would love to own, but the stock is just too darn expensive. [Read Dave’s article here] The basic takeaway is to keep a close eye on the stock in hopes that an opportunity arises to pick it up at a more appealing valuation. About a decade ago, a specialty apparel retailer had a stock that qualified as a small cap and flew under the radar screen of most investors. But between about 2003 and 2006, the market began to take note of its stellar growth prospects, and sent the shares up more than ten-fold. Like Dave describes in his article, I thought I missed the boat, as the stock has risen only slightly and the valuation has remained rich, which means there have been only a few brief opportunities to pick up the shares on the cheap. One of those opportunity exists now, because the stock is bumping along its lows of the past year, which I atribte simply to… Read More

As cliche as the term “stocks on sale” has become, there’s still something exciting about grabbing a great stock for less than five bucks a share. They just seem well equipped to dole out bigger rewards — in terms of percentage gains — than their higher-priced counterparts. Read More

Investing would be so much easier with a time machine. A person could simply go back in time and buy today’s industry behemoths while they were still just up and coming regular companies. Too bad there’s no such thing as a time machine. However,… Read More

Commodity prices are surging. But rather than recommending a pure commodity play for this week’s trade, I’m intrigued by a stock that not only benefits from strong commodity prices, but also more profits for farmers. And with farmers seeing fatter… Read More