For Immediate Release

Chicago, IL – August 25, 2009 – Zacks.com announces the list of stocks featured in the Analyst Blog. Every day the Zacks Equity Research analysts discuss the latest news and events impacting stocks and the financial markets. Stocks recently featured in the blog include: News Corp. (NWS), McGraw-Hill (MHP), NYSE Euronext (NYX), Thomson Reuters (TRIN) and Novartis (NVS).

Get the most recent insight from Zacks Equity Research with the free Profit from the Pros newsletter: http://at.zacks.com/?id=5513

Here are highlights from Monday’s Analyst Blog:

Dow Jones to Change Hands

Dow Jones & Co., owned by News Corp. (NWS), has started seeking potential buyers for its stock market index business, including the renowned benchmark Dow Jones Industrial Average.

Goldman Sachs has been appointed to explore strategic options for the business. News Corp. bought

...

Dow Jones & Co., owned by News Corp. (NWS), has started seeking potential buyers for its stock market index business, including the renowned benchmark Dow Jones Industrial Average.

Goldman Sachs has been appointed to explore strategic options for the business. News Corp. bought Dow Jones & Co. in 2007 for $5.7 billion, and has never released any financials for the unit since its acquisition. As an independent company, Dow Jones last reported results for the first nine months of 2007, when its revenue increased 18% year over year to $101.3 million.

Market analysts believe that competitors, like McGraw-Hill’s (MHP) Standard & Poor’s, FTSE, a joint venture between the Financial Times and the London Stock Exchange, MSCI Barra, Russell Indexes, NYSE Euronext (NYX), Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters (TRIN), will be interested in Dow’s index business.

The company’s stock market index business consists of 130,000 equity indices

...

Country classification has gotten really interesting in the past couple of years with the rising interest in emerging and frontier markets. But that's probably just my inner unrepentant nerd talking.

Right now, in the wake of MSCI’s reclassification of Israel as a developed market, I’m working on a rundown of the country classifications of four major index providers: MSCI, Dow Jones, FTSE and Standard & Poor’s.

The evolution of emerging markets (and sometimes devolution of developed markets—see Greece, which could lose developed-market status in the FTSE indexes) is just particularly fascinating to me. Take some of the frontier/emerging markets that the index providers cover at the very bottom rungs of the investability ladder: Latvia? Slovakia? Trinidad & Tobago? Mauritius?

Frankly, I’m dying to know what the investment stories are behind these tiny, tiny markets. And while I believe frontier markets (like, say, Vietnam) offer some awesome investment opportunities, is anyone really itching to

...

(WSJ Feb 25, 2009) “The S&P Gets Its Earnings Wrong, Stocks are cheaper than they look”, by Jeremy J. Siegel

Economist Jeremy Siegel (associated with WisdomTree funds, and professor at Wharton) is an important figure.  When the Wall Street Journal published his editorial (read full article) claiming that Standard & Poor’s had a flawed method that massively overstates the S&P 500 P/E, that became something that can’t be ignored.  In fact, Siegel said if S&P had calculated index earnings correctly, investors would see that stocks are historically undervalued.

The blogosphere came alive with comments that spanned the gamut from agreement to disagreement in both polite in impolite tones.

Several of our clients called to inquire, since we have been telling them that stocks are expensive and that the index needs to fall significantly to come in line with current realities, and to be in the lower range of historic P/E valuation.

Rather

...

Known for its focus on valuation figures to weight portfolios, the ETF provider is shifting gears by launching a new large-cap growth fund.

Since first jumping into the exchange-traded funds market two-plus years ago with 20 dividend-weighted exchange-traded funds, WisdomTree Investments has firmly been cast as a value-styled management shop.

That focus on weighting index-based ETF portfolios on business fundamentals -- rather than traditional  market-cap size figures -- hasn't changed. But the New York-based firm launched Thursday an ETF focused squarely on large-cap growth stocks.  

By itself, that wouldn't seem to be a major introduction. Diversified large-cap growth funds, after all, aren't exactly out of the ordinary.

But two items stand to separate the WisdomTree LargeCap Growth ETF (NYSEArca: ROI) from the pack.

For one, the new fund focuses on corporate earnings, otherwise known as net income or profit, to weight stocks in its portfolio. That's different from rivals such as

...

Investors have been surprised by the FTSE/JSE All Share Index’s strong rally of 24,9% since the market’s low on 23 January 2008. What is even more surprising is the large difference in the improvement of the major sub-indices. Resources companies have rallied by an incredible 44,8% on the back of only a few shares, followed by industrial companies with 18,6% and financial companies with only 9,4%.

As a result of the sharp rise in commodity prices on global markets and the woes of foreign banks (owing to the credit crunch), investors are sorely tempted to switch investments in resources companies to financial companies. However, investors should bear in mind that the return on an investment in a

…