DrStockPick.com Stock Report!

Tuesday September 8, 2009

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Doug Foshee, president and chief executive officer of El Paso Corporation (NYSE: EP), will present tomorrow, September 9, at the Barclays Capital CEO Energy/Power Conference in New York. The presentation will begin at 9:05 a.m. EDT, 8:05 a.m. CDT with an audio webcast available in the Investors section of El Paso’s Web site at www.elpaso.com. Presentation slides will be available prior to the presentation also in the Investors section of the company’s Web site.

Michigan Heritage Bancorp, Inc. (OTC Bulletin Board: MHBC) today announced that it has called a special meeting of shareholders to

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Who does not like a good argument? I for one do, especially when it comes to economics. A lot of water has already gone under the bridge relative to the note published a couple of weeks back by VariantPerception on the Spanish banking sector which provided a timely and, in my opinion, accurate analysis of the issues facing the Spanish banking and financial system as a function of the dire macroeconomic situation Spain finds itself with skyrocketing unemployment and lingering (and entrenching) deflation. Now, the reason that I point out how "a lot of water has gone under the bridge" is quite simply that I know the people at Variant and, as you know, I also know Edward Hugh who was very effective in dessimating the conclusions of the report across his (second) empire now growing on Facebook. As Edward noted here on A Fistful of Euros in

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Epazz, Inc., an enterprise software company providing web applications to corporations, schools, and the public sector, is actively growing its worldwide distribution network. DeskFlex and Professional Resource Management, two fully owned Epazz subsidiaries, are helping Epazz get its products to a wider market, and the company now has several clients in Asia, including SAP South Korea. Epazz is now expected to announce a new reseller in South America, plus has just added a new distribution channel through RiverIT Pte Ltd., based in Singapore.

RiverIT provides web design, hosting, email, and systems support services in Asia, using a variety of third-party systems, with an emphasis on firewall, spam protection, and related security. Epazz believes that companies are increasingly in need of superior IT options to improve efficiency and effectiveness to overcome current economic conditions, and partnering with channel distributors such as RiverIT is a key part of the Epazz growth strategy.

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by Edward Hugh: Barcelonabr /br /br /pa href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_ngczZkrw340/SlmdGD2bh-I/AAAAAAAAOoo/P8vnyB3RTno/s1600-h/bulgaria+population.png"img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 258px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5357485959172294626" border="0" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_ngczZkrw340/SlmdGD2bh-I/AAAAAAAAOoo/P8vnyB3RTno/s400/bulgaria+population.png" //abr /br /br /The International Monetary Fund this week forecast the recession in Bulgaria would be deeper than it previously predicted. Such a decision should come as no surprise to anyone, since the country's economic dynamics in both the short and long term look extremely unstable, and Bulgaria is now almost certainly headed towards a series of more or less hair-raising roller-coaster rides. Even the briefest of glances at the population chart above should lead even the most sceptical among us to stop and think a little about the possible economic implications of such an appauling demographic outlook. As can be seen, the opening to the west brought a sharp outflow of people in the late 1980s (mainly ethnic Turks), but the important thing ...

Why buy Check Point Software Technology [CHKP: 22.18, 0.00 (0.00%)]? Check Point is the gorilla of pure-play security software. The company is a global leader in cyber security software with products deployed in virtually every major global corporation including all Fortune 100 companies and its technology dominates the global market for perimeter defenses such as firewalls and virtual private networks. The company describes itself as:

“Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. is the leader in securing the Internet. Check Point offers total security solutions featuring a unified gateway, single endpoint agent and single management architecture, customized to fit customers’ dynamic business needs. This combination is unique and is a result of our leadership and innovation in the enterprise firewall, personal firewall/endpoint, data security and VPN markets.

Check Point’s pure focus is on information security. Through its NGX platform, Check Point delivers a unified

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Check Point Software Technologies Limited (...

“The Big Takeover” by Matt Taibbi is probably the best article written to date explaining the financial crisis and how we got to where we are now. Taibbi’s necessarily lengthy article explains the problems, names the “poipetrators”, and exposes all of the conflicts of interest— absolutely a must read.

AIG, Goldman Sachs, and J. P. Morgan turn out to be the major players causing perhaps the greatest financial crisis in modern history— even if the pain is unlikely to get near Great Depression proportions, the dollar losses to individual investors have certainly gone as far.

JPM was the brewmeister of the CDO, a vat full of various kinds of income securities, determined to be less risky because the income on most would almost certainly keep flowing— kind of like the once popular junk bond fund that Wall Street insisted was not risky …

It is not only economic data and the punditry and commentary following this which is all at rage at the moment, so is a growing mixture of more or less interesting debates amongst (academic) economists about public spending v. tax cuts, bloodletting v. actually doing something and, as it were, the odd case for or against protectionism. Add to this the growing array of voices attacking the inner workings of the economics profession and it seems that all the pieces are there to make it a nice rejuvenating time for economics as a social science. I still have my sincere hopes that this is true, but I am not sure that significant steps have been taken at this juncture. 

Thus, and as much as I would like to have a go myself at the various themes and agendas flying around I have opted to stay a bit clear; or so

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The fact that Hungary's National Bank did not decide to make an unexpected interest rate cut at its meeting earlier this week seems to have a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchiveamp;sid=a84zp9hh0af0"surprised some/a, but it really should not have done. According to James Morsink, head of the IMF delegation to Budapest, Hungary only has room to cut its benchmark interest rate a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchiveamp;sid=aW.6Yo1wzmp4"at a “gradual and cautious” pace/a. The reasoning behind this view is simple, any more rapid reduction in the bank's benchmark rate risks being accompanied by a devaluation of the forint, and and any such devaluation would inevitably lead to a rise in mortgage defaults and problems for the banking system as holders of Swiss Franc forex loans find themselves unable to maintain their payments as unemployment rises and wages and salaries fall.br /br /Thus it is that even though the Hungarian economy is now in its worst recession in over a decade ...

Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL) used to rule its niche world and will continue to do so, with lots of room to grow. As Coldplay’s “I used to rule the world…” played softly on the outside stereo speakers of my sailboat “Southern Cross” as my family and I pleasantly glided by Execution Rock on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon in the Long Island Sound, I could not stop myself from thinking how the song got there.  It was coming out of my daughters’ Apple iPod, interfacing with the boat’s new iPod-ready stereo system.  And I was wondering whether it was time to get into Apple’s stock.  Yes … even on a weekend sail. Apple in My Home I have been patiently waiting to get into Apple for a long time. And now the market was tanking, sending good companies’ stock prices down with bad ...