Fortune Brands Inc. (FO) reported third quarter earnings of 82 cents per share. Although earnings were well above the Zacks Consensus Estimate of 63 cents, they were down 59.8% year-over-year. Net sales for the quarter declined 10.6% year-over-year to $1.72 billion, primarily due to flat sales for the company’s spirits business and comparatively moderate revenue declines in the golf and home products brands. The Spirits segment revenues were flat during the quarter, as higher sales of Jim Beam bourbon and Canadian Club whisky, the Cruzan acquisition and strong growth in emerging markets was almost fully offset by soft results in other international markets. In addition, a benefit from the company’s route-to-market initiatives was largely offset by unfavorable foreign exchange. There are signs that the U.S. housing downturn is decelerating, which coupled with the company’s share-gain initiatives across all product categories helped moderate the sales decline ...

DrStockPick.com Stock Report!

Monday August 17, 2009

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Acushnet Company, the golf business of Fortune Brands, Inc. (NYSE: FO), announced that on August 14, 2009, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit granted the company’s request for a new trial and issued other favorable decisions in its patent dispute with Callaway Golf.

Petroleum Development Corporation (Nasdaq: PETD) announced today that it has closed its public offering of 4,312,500 shares of common stock, including 562,500 shares issued upon full exercise of underwriters’ over-allotment option, at a price to the public of $12.00 per share. The net proceeds from the offering were approximately $48.6 million (after deducting underwriting discounts and

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Highlights include D.R. Horton, Inc. (DHI), Whirlpool Corp. (WHR) and Fortune Brands, Inc. (FO).A recent academic paper by Atif Mian and Amir Sufi, both of the University of Chicago and the NBER, took a very close look at the effect of mortgage equity withdrawal on the overall economy during the housing bubble. "Mortgage equity withdrawal" is the more technical name for the housing ATM.It was very actively pushed by the banks during the housing bubble, with ads showing money hidden in people's houses that they were not taking advantage of. I knew it was significant, but this paper indicates that it was even more important than I thought it was. Here is an abstract from the paper:"Using individual-level data on homeowner debt and defaults from 1997 to 2008, we show that borrowing against the increase in home equity by ...

Shares of Fortune Brands Inc. (FO) have advanced more than 5% today after the owner of Jim Beam and Moen brands provided a better-than-expected first-quarter earnings preview.

The company expects first-quarter earnings of 30 cents per share, excluding items, which is higher than the lowered consensus estimate of 17 cents.

However, the company also reduced its annual dividend to 76 cents per share, compared to $1.76 earlier. The initiative will enable the company retain an additional $110 million over the remainder of 2009 and $150 million on an annualized basis.

Analysts on average have reduced full-year earnings estimates, pulling the consensus lower by 4 cents over the past 60 days to $2.23 per share.

FO, a Zacks #4 Rank ("Sell") stock, is trading on higher than-usual-volume of 3 million, compared to average volume of about 2.7 million.

"FO" Free Stock Analysis: Buy? Sell? Hold?...

Highlights include Lennar Corp. (LEN), D.R. Horton, Inc. (DHI), Weyerhaeuser Co. (WY), Masco Corp. (MAS) and Fortune Brands, Inc. (FO). New home sales fell just 0.6% in March from an upwardly revised February sales pace. However, at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of just 356,000, it was still the worst March since records of new home sales started in 1962. Nationwide, on a year-over-year basis, new home sales are down 30.6% -- and remember the slide in new home sales did not start a year ago. From the peak in mid-2005, new home sales are down almost 75% (see graph below; larger version available at: http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/). Regionally the results were very mixed (the regional numbers have extremely large standard errors, so take all of them with a grain of salt). In the Northeast, sales plunged 32.1% for the month, and were

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Here are the stocks added to the Zacks #5 Rank ("strong sell") List today:

Axis Capital Holdings Ltd (AXS) Caterpillar Inc (CAT) CBL & Associates Properties Inc (CBL) Enterprise GP Holdings LP (EPE) Equinix Inc (EQIX) Exterran Holdings Inc (EXH) Fortune Brands Inc (FO) GATX Corp (GMT) Genuine Parts Co (GPC) Ingram Micro Inc (IM) Interline Brands Inc (IBI) KB Financial Group Inc (KB) Kyocera Corp (KYO) Lincoln National Corp (LNC) Porter Bancorp Inc (PBIB) Sunstone Hotel Investors Inc (SHO) Textainer Group Holdings Ltd (TGH) Time Warner Inc (TWX) Turkcell Iletisim Hizmetleri AS (TKC) View the entire Zacks #5 Rank List.

Zacks Investment Research

The economy is in awful shape right now, but it is not in a terminal decline from which it will never recover. We have faced hard times before and always managed to come out stronger on the other side. While I do believe in happy endings, I do not look for one right around the corner.

Waiting for the recovery does not mean sitting on your hands and doing nothing. There are things that you can be doing today to help yourself prosper for the long run. Indeed, now may be the best time in your life to make moves that will help you have greater wealth later in life.

The stock market almost always turns up before the economy does. Trying to pick the absolute bottom is a fool's game. We are far enough along in the process that it is time to start tiptoeing back

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Highlights include D.R. Horton, Inc. (DHI), Standard Pacific Corp. (SPF), Weyerhaeuser Company (WY), Masco Corporation (MAS) and Fortune Brands, Inc. (FO).Let's just keep this simple mantra in mind right now when it comes to new housing data. More new housing starts and permits: Bad; more new housing sales: Good. That is not because I want to see more construction workers out of work -- I don't -- but because each new home built adds to the towering inventory of homes waiting to be sold, and continues to push housing prices lower.Housing prices will continue to fall in any case, until they reach their historical relationships with incomes and rents, but adding to excess supply sure does not help matters. With that in mind, the new home sales data from January was an unmitigated disaster.Nationwide, new home sales fell ...

In bull markets, investors sometimes use a stock trading technique called 'Buying Dividends,' which is the technique of buying stocks before the ex dividend date and selling the stock shortly after the ex date at approximately the same price, yet still being entitled to the dividend. This technique usually only works in bull markets.If you are interested in buying dividends, there are several stocks in several different sectors and industries to choose from. In order to be entitled to the dividend, you have to buy the stock before the ex-dividend date, and you can't sell the stock until after the ex date. The actual dividend may not be paid for another month.All of the following stocks have market caps over $500 million, and yields over 3%. NuStar GP Holdings, LLC (NSH) is going ex-dividend on 11/3/2008. The stock has a PE of 17 ...