The Board of Directors of Goodrich Corp. (GR) yesterday announced an 8% dividend increase to 27 cents per share from the current dividend of 25 cents per share on the company’s common stock. The dividend is payable Jan 4, 2010 to shareholders of record as of Dec 1, 2009.

The increased dividend reflects the company’s continued financial strength and long-term growth prospects, including work on commercial and military aircraft now in development.  These prospects are supported by the company’s presence on the newer aircraft platforms in service, which should generate substantial aftermarket sales.

Goodrich engages in the supply of aerospace components, systems, and services worldwide. Goodrich serves commercial, regional, business, and general aviation airplane original equipment; commercial, regional, business, and general aviation airplane aftermarket; and defense and space markets. With one of the most strategically diversified portfolios of products in the industry, Goodrich serves a global customer base with significant worldwide

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• Boeing (NYSE:BA) announced it will take a third quarter charge of $1 billion due to higher production costs and difficult market conditions for its 747-8 program. The firm will also delay, until 2010, the initial flight of its 747-8 jumbo freighter

• Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) released its new mobile-phone software to take on Apple's (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPhone

• Amazon.com (NYSE:AMZN) announced the company will begin selling an international version of its e-reader in over 100 countries. The firm also lowered the price of

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div style="text-align: justify;"span style="font-weight: bold;"At the peak of one cycle and the trough of another/spanbr /br /We are at the peak of a decade long boom in Defense spending, and at the trough of a two year Aerospace bear market. span style="font-weight: bold;"Goldman Sachs is upgrading Aerospace to Attractive and downgrading Defense to Cautious,/span and expect Aamp;D investors to increasingly rotate out of the latter and into the former, particularly given that, at current trading levels, one pays the same price for trough Aerospace earnings as they do for peak Defense earnings.br /br /span style="font-weight: bold;"Firm is upgrading Aerospace to Attractive given:/spanbr /br /span style="font-weight: bold;"1) Traditional Buy signals are turning green./span The second derivative in yoy air traffic and the level of aircraft orders are both close to a bottom, which typically indicates the start of an upturn in the group.br /br /span style="font-weight: bold;"2) Expectations are low and ...

Monday:Economic Leading Indicators (-0.3%)Earnings Eaton (ETN), Halliburton (HAL), Mattel (MAT), American Express (AXP), Everest (RE), Hexcel (HXL), Logitech (LOGI), Netflix (NFLX), SanDisk (SNDK), Texas Instruments (TXN)Tuesday:Economic NAEarnings 3M (MMM), Caterpillar (CAT), Biogen (BIIB), BlackRock (BLK), Coach (COH), Fifth Third (FITB), M&T Bank (MTB), OptionsXpress (OXPS), US Banc (USB), Stanley (SWK), Broadcom (BRCM), CH Robinson (CHRW), Cree (CREE), Cerner (CERN), E*Trade (ETFC), Qlogic (QLGC), Sigma Aldrich (SIAL), VMware (VMW), XL Cap (XL), Yahoo (YHOO), Tupperware (TUP)Wednesday:Economic Weekly CrudeEarnings Air Prod (APD), Alleghany (ATI), AT&T (T), Boeing (BA), Conoco (COP), EMC (EMC), CNX (CNX), Genzyme (GENZ), McDonalds (MCD), Merck (MRK), WellPoint (WLP), Allstate (ALL), Amazon (AMZN), Amgen (AMGN), Baidu (BIDU), Chipotle (CMG), Citrix (CTXS), Core Labs (CLB), Lam R (LRCX), Nutrisystem (NTRI), Pulte (PHM), Terex (TEX), Ryland (RYL), Seagate (STX)Thursday:Economic Weekly ClaimsEarnings Altria (MO), Bunge ...

Before turning our attention to the third quarter, let’s recap what happened in the second quarter.

A total of 483 firms, or 96.6% of the S&P 500, have reported. Aside from the Financials and Discretionary firms, the results are encouraging. Positive surprises beat disappointments by a 2.5:1 ratio, which is only slightly below recent historical norms. The median surprise is also inline with recent history at 3.15%.

The median year-over-year EPS growth rate of 9.38% is wonderful news for the market. It indicates that the "typical" firm in the S&P 500 is still growing its EPS at a solid rate.

In terms of median growth, Energy took the gold (+25.4%), with Tech (+21.6%) taking silver and Telecom (+15.5%) bronze. The Financials were clearly the weakest, down 18.2%. Consumer Discretionary was the only other sector to post negative growth, falling 4.2%. (There are still a handful of Discretionary firms left to

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Edact Technologies Corp. (EDAC) is a maker of jet engine components, tooling, fixtures, molds, and machine spindles. The company’s primary area of business is aerospace where it makes jet engine parts, special tooling, equipment, gauges and components used to manufacture jet engines. Connecticut-based Edac could be a compelling play for investors in the event of increased defense spending by the federal government and as airlines refurbish and upgrade their current planes.

Last month, Edac noted that it expects sales to increase in the second half of 2008 and that its order backlog is currently at an all-time high due to increased efforts to expand its customer base. Sales for the first half of 2008 were just over $22 million, the company said. Going forward, the company said it expects aerospace demand to continue to be robust. For the fiscal year that ended December 2007, almost 75 percent of Edac’s sales came

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We've discussed recently the hot new place for natural gas is the potentially enormous Haynesville Shale [Jul 2: Petrohawk Energy and Chesapeake Energy Flying on Haynesville Shale News] (EDIT: Let me add 2 additional names) I've been hoping one of the 4 names closely associated with this space, either Petrohawk Energy (HK), Goodrich Petroleum (GDP), GMX Resources (GMXR), and Comstock Resources (CRK) would sell down to their 50 day moving average now that natural gas has finally been hit. But no mas as the charts below show. Things are going so well, that Goodrich actually placed a 3M share offering at $64 today and the stock is ...