Saturday December 20, 2008 Navivest

Allstate - (ALL) $31.86 +$1.92

Shares of the insurer were up as were other insurers, which were mostly up in the day, probably on the auto industry bailout that was announced by President Bush.

Apache – (APA) $74.57 +$4.76

Shares of oil and gas producer Apache were up after crude oil managed to eek out very modest gains on Friday.

Baker Hughes - (BHI) $29.99 +$1.74

Baker Hughes is a service provider to the oil and gas exploration industry and the shares were up in tandem with crude oil prices.

Darden Restaurants – (DRI) $28.55 +$4.57

Darden Restaurants, which among its holdings operates Olive Garden and Red Lobster, on Thursday, reported that its second quarter 2009 diluted net earnings per share from continuing operations were $0.42 cents, an increase of 40%, versus 30 cents in the prior year.

With analysts looking for just $0.31 per share, Wall Street must have been

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Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL) just reported profit flat despite 6% revenue growth and investors a good look at the stock and decided that it was still The One.  Shares of ORCL are up 3% after hours. Here's the quick and dirty from the call: - Q2 Profit excluding items in line with estimates - Says stronger dollar hurt revenue, profit - Sees Q3 new software sales flat to down 10% - Says new software license revenue fell ...

Open Text Corporation (...

Investing Like Warren Buffett: Take Your Cue From the World’s Best Investor

by Alexander Green, Chairman, Investment U Investment Director, The Oxford Club Monday, December 8, 2008: Issue #897

Not long ago I excerpted a recent New York Times column by Warren Buffett explaining his take on the recent market sell-off.

Despite the dour economic outlook, Buffett expects U.S. companies to report record profits within five years. He is getting fully invested in stocks in his own personal account. Since Warren Buffett’s column originally ran on October 14th, however, the S&P 500 has dropped 13%.

Hardly a day goes by that I don’t get emails telling me that Buffett “blew it.” He was “too early.” Or he “failed to call the bottom.”

I beg to differ …

Warren Buffett’s Economic Outlook

For the record, here is part of

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div style="text-align: justify;"Jefferies is out with an interesting upgrade on span style="font-weight: bold;"Red Had (NYSE:RHT)/span taking their rating to Buy from Hold with a $16 tgt.br /br /span style="font-weight: bold;"OK November. /spanChecks indicate steady demand for the core RHEL products (AP, RHN, etc.), while Jboss sales continue to outperform. It seems like Red Hat is picking up some share in middleware dueto BEA/Oracle (ORCL, $16.13, Buy) dislocation and because open source solutions become relatively more attractive as budgets tighten.br /br /span style="font-weight: bold;"Cisco relationship on tap./span Industry sources indicate that Cisco's (CSCO, $16.01, Buy) upcoming line of blade servers is likely to offer RHEL as an option, perhaps even as the default OS. The KVM (non-bare metal) virtualization features in RHEL would allow any type of virtualized container to run on the Cisco blades.br /br /span style="font-weight: bold;"Upgrade to Buy. /spanWith 100% recurring revenue including 80% off the balance sheet ...

How to Beat Warren Buffett at His Own Game

This morning, Electricité de France (EPA: EDF) made another attempt to purchase Constellation Energy Group (NYSE: CEG). EDF’s new offer of $52 a share for half of the company is almost as much as MidAmerican Energy -Warren Buffett’s subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRK.A) - paid for the entire company in September.

His $4.7 billion deal for Constellation - about what it cost to build one nuclear reactor - bought him three nuclear plants and 75 power-generating units. CEG jumped 12% this morning to over $28.

Buffett has been on a buying spree of U.S. equities over the past few months. And he even wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal to support why. But before today, CEG was trading below his purchase price. And it’s not the only one.

A $3 billion investment in General Electric (NYSE: GE)

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It's time to start doing your gift shopping. Here are some great investment, finance, and stock market books to give your friends and relatives. These are in no particular order other than the approximate order that I wrote about them, within the categories. You can click on the title of each book to get more info about them. And if you aren't sure what books are right for gifts, how about an a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00067L6TQ/ref=nosim/?%5Fencoding=UTF8tag=antiquestocka-20linkCode=ur2camp=1789creative=9325"Amazon Gift Certificate/aimg src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=antiquestocka-20amp;l=ur2amp;o=1" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" /.br /br / center span style="font-weight:bold;"Fiction/span /centerbr /br /a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0804119120?ie=UTF8tag=antiquestocka-20linkCode=as2camp=1789creative=9325creativeASIN=0804119120"A Conspiracy of Paper/aimg src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=antiquestocka-20l=as2o=1a=0804119120" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" / by David Lissbr /br /a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FDay-Trader-Stephen-Frey%2Fdp%2F034544325X%2Ftag=antiquestocka-20linkCode=ur2camp=1789creative=9325"The Day Trader/aimg src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=antiquestocka-20amp;l=ur2amp;o=1" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" / by Stephen Freybr /br /a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FSet-Up-Paul-Erdman%2Fdp%2F0312968051%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks%26qid%3D1194850092%26sr%3D1-1tag=antiquestocka-20linkCode=ur2camp=1789creative=9325" The Set-Up/aimg ...

Addison Wiggin and Kate Incontrera look at the implications of America’s large and persistent trade deficit. The country is dependent on foreign products for its energy, food and leisure needs. Simply put: America is consuming more than it produces.  And as this imbalance continues to grow, the long-term risks to the economy become more severe.

This from Money Morning:

Although still seen as the world’s economic superpower, the United States has found itself with a myriad of problems: Skyrocketing federal debt, growing annual budget deficits, an almost nonexistent personal savings rate, and the dubious honor of being the country with the largest current account deficit, of which trade makes up the largest part.

A trade deficit occurs when you are importing more than you are exporting — in other words, you are consuming more than you are producing. So the next time you are at Wal–Mart (NYSE:

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EnterConnect Inc. offers enterprise-proven on-demand business portals to address the requirements of specific industries, as well as business processes that are common across multiple industries to help companies increase customer satisfaction, growth and productivity. This basically brings the internet and combines them with a company’s intranet and extranet to produce one seamless platform onto which all services may be performed.

EnterConnect provides five different capabilities: CustomerConnect - provides rapid portal creation, and content and asset management, for supporting effective customer communication and collaboration. EmployeeConnect - provides all types of employee self-service functions, HR processes, workflows, forms, and document management. PartnerConnect - provides partner communication, collaboration and content sharing, both inside and outside the organization. TeamConnect - provides creation of any portal or website required to improve team communication, collaboration and productivity. WebConnect - provides independent, rapid creation and implementation of any number of intranets, extranets or internet web portals for

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A must read article on Minyanville.com puts the smack down on General Electric (NYSE:GE) shares, and another one from Bloomberg.com isn't going to help shareholders come tomorrow or the foreseeable future.  GE shares get ready to battle the media. Let's face it, when fear is driven into the hearts of investors, no matter how it gets there, word of mouth, CNBC, your baby's momma -- it's fear none the less. When that happens, investors bail, and the selling could jump start now that the media is tearing GE a new one. General Electric (NYSE:GE) appears to be a "cheap stock" when you consider traditional investing measures: P/E now under 10, at 7.67. Shares are of GE are now $16 down 58% in the last year. It's a company we have all grown up with, same ...