Ask most investors about E*Trade and you’ll get a mouthful about why the company is a toxic asset to be avoided at all costs.

I can’t say I blame them. After all, the company did make a foolish foray into the real estate lending business. And it did so at precisely the wrong time – the top of the market. In turn, like many banks, it got sacked as loan losses mounted.

At that point, forget a takeover. Bankruptcy appeared more imminent. And the stock quickly reflected this widely held belief, plunging by 95% from its 2007 high to trade below $1.

Unsurprisingly, many investors sprinted away from the company. But here’s what most of them don’t understand: Beneath the muck of E*Trade’s real estate operations, it possesses a valuable asset – its brokerage business…

For example, even during aterrible year for stocks in 2008, E*Trade (NASDAQ:ETFC) still managed to grow

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PennyOmega.com Stock Report!

PennyOmega.com Hot Stock News & Alerts!

 

Thursday July 30, 2009

PennyOmega.com Stock Report!

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Competitive Technologies, Inc. (NYSE Amex:CTT) announced today that it has signed an agreement with Innovative Medical Therapies, Inc. (IMT) granting them exclusive distribution rights to CTT’s pain therapy medical device in the United States and related territories excluding selected Federal agencies. The contract provides for minimum monthly cash payments to CTT totaling over $1 million for the first five months. These minimum monthly payments increase throughout the term of the agreement with the fourth year minimum payments reaching $9 million and eighth year minimum payments of $21 million. IMT will receive shipments of CTT’s pain therapy medical device in return for

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Bad news for anyone who works for a living: Chances are, you’re gonna be working even longer.

Sure, things are tough all over, but this little tidbit from Charles Schwab is particularly depressing (via Reuters).

“A quarter of U.S. employers have eliminated matching contributions to employee 401(k) retirement plans since September to save money amid the economy's downturn, according to research released on Monday.”

As if investors didn’t have things bad enough. As someone who started retirement savings in earnest back in the 1980s, I know my own personal retirement account investment performance has looked an awful lot like this all-too-familiar chart:

 

 

No, that’s not really my portfolio — it’s the S&P 500. But I was deep into indexing before I even had a full-time job, much less a 401(k), and I rode that first drop in ’87 right down to the ground in my trusty Vanguard

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For Immediate Release

Chicago, IL - May 20, 2009 - Zacks Equity Research highlights Companhia Energetica de Minas Gerais, or CEMIG (CIG) as the Bull of the Day and Motorola (MOT) the Bear of the Day. In addition, Zacks Equity Research provides analysis on Goldman Sachs (GS), E-Trade (ETFC) and Charles Schwab (SCHW).

Full analysis of all these stocks is available at http://at.zacks.com/?id=2676.

Here is a synopsis of all five stocks:

Bull of the Day:

We are keeping our Buy recommendation on Companhia Energetica de Minas Gerais, or CEMIG (CIG). Although the company posted lower-than-expected results for the first quarter of 2009, those results were impacted by a few non-recurring items.

However, the short-to-medium term outlook remains promising as demand for electricity in Brazil keeps growing. Despite the global credit crunch, we

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Reports surfaced in London on Sunday that at least three new bids for iShares have surfaced.  

(Editor's note: The following was submitted by IndexUniverse.com's Murray Coleman in San Francisco and IndexUniverse.EU's Paul Amery in London.)

The recently announced $4.4 billion deal by Barclays Global Investors to sell its exchange-traded funds business to private equity manager CVC Captial Partners could be in jeporday. 

Reports surfaced in London on Sunday that at least three new bids have surfaced. The Daily Telegraph is naming private equity groups Apax, BC Partners and Hellman & Friedman as parties expressing an interest in bidding more for iShares than the original terms offered by CVC Capital.

A Barclays spokesman told the paper that it was too early to tell if any new offers would turn into anything concrete. But he did tell

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Reports surfaced in London on Sunday that at least three new bids for iShares have surfaced.  

(Editor's note: The following was submitted by IndexUniverse.com's Murray Coleman in San Francisco and IndexUniverse.EU's Paul Amery in London.)

The recently announced $4.4 billion deal by San Francisco-based Barclays Global Investors to sell its exchange-traded funds business to private equity manager CVC Captial Partners could be in jeporday. 

Reports surfaced in London on Sunday that at least three new bids have surfaced. The Daily Telegraph is naming private equity groups Apax, BC Partners and Hellman & Friedman as parties expressing an interest in bidding more for iShares than the original terms offered by CVC Capital.

A report by the Sunday Times of London also listed BC Partners. In fact, the paper says that the firm is now willing

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Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT): Stock of the Day

by Ted Leinbach, Research Team, The Oxford Club 

When the New York Stock Exchange needed a computer operating system to handle its vast amount of daily transactions, it did not look to the perennial tech-bellwethers like Apple or Google.

Instead, the exchange had a much better company in mind, one whose technology is stronger and more efficient. And one whose technology is “crash-proof”.  

You see, the NYSE simply can’t run on a program like Microsoft Windows. Why? According to this company’s President and CEO Jim Whitehurst, “It crashes too often.”

That’s why the New York Stock Exchange selected Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT). Headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina, Red Hat is the largest provider of Linux software and is the most recognized open brand source in the world.

The company serves global enterprises with technology

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A lot of people called me yesterday to ask who might buy iShares. The short answer is, I don't know. But like everyone, I can't help but speculate.

I know my more serious colleagues—Jim Wiandt and Murray Coleman—will accuse me of falling short of the desired journalistic reserve. To that, I plead guilty. The list of potential suitors I lay out below is rank speculation, based on nothing more than my intuition about the industry and a few silly hunches.

But the fact that Barclays is shopping iShares around is big news in the ETF industry. There are important ramifications. And besides, this is a blog, and if I can't speculate here ...  

So let's get it out of the way. Here is my list of potential suitors. This is borrowed from my own speculation, and that reported by John Spence and others in the media yesterday:

Big ...

In the currency market, the dollar sunk against the euro. Late Wednesday, the euro was trading at $1.2651 vs. $1.2560 on Tuesday.

The dollar declined against most major currencies yesterday, losing ground as equity markets shifted to the black.

In economic news, it appears investors were encouraged by details of a government program designed to help as many as 9 million borrowers stay in their homes through refinanced mortgages or loans that are modified to lower monthly payments, as stocks broke a five-day losing streak.

“Virtually everyone was expecting some sort of a bounce, we just didn’t know exactly when that would occur,” said Randy Frederick, director of trading and derivatives at Charles Schwab. “You can’t go down forever.”

That’s a pretty stupid way to look at things in our view. Nothing has changed in the real world and this bounce is based not on fundamentals but lunacy.

Also reported on Wednesday (and

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Last week I posted about the direction of the blog, and the format in which most of the content was heading. Because of market conditions, my posting has been a lot of news and stories, with my own take on them. I've been doing my best to look at individual stocks and sectors to analyze and discuss. So today, I'll share my watch list, or the current stocks on my radar. Keep in mind, these aren't all stocks I'm looking to buy, but names I'm keeping an eye on. I often watch specific stocks to see how they react in different markets and sometimes use them as indicators of strength or weakness in other potential names. If I have similar stocks, I'll post them together. So here goes...br /br /ABB (a href="http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=abb"ABB/a). Diversified electrical company with a great reach. I think they'll ...