Reynolds American (RAI), manufacturer of four of the top 10 best-selling cigarette brands in the United States , reported its third quarter results. The company reported earnings of $1.24, down 3.9% year over year. Despite the strong performance of the Conwood business and market share gains of brands like Camel, Pall Mall and Grizzly, net sales declined 5.3% year-over-year to $2.2 billion. The company’s cigarette shipment volume declined 11.0% due to wholesale inventory reductions associated with the Federal tax increase and also due to lower volume from the company’s non-support brands. During the quarter, industry cigarette volume declined 12.6%. The company’s growth brands, Camel and Pall Mall , gained a strong cigarette market share of 2.1 percentage points, bringing their combined share to 12.7%. This drove the company’s total cigarette market share to 45%. Camel, the company’s flagship brand, had a market share of ...

Reynolds American (RAI), manufacturer of four of the top 10 best-selling cigarette brands in the United States, reported its second quarter results. The company reported earnings of $1.29, and beat expectations by $0.14. Despite the strong performance of the Conwood business and market share gains of brands like Camel, Pall Mall and Grizzly, net sales declined 3.8% year-over-year to $2.3 billion. The company’s cigarette shipment volume declined 6.0% due to wholesale inventory reductions associated with the Federal tax increase and also due to lower volume from the company’s non-support brands. During the quarter, industry cigarette volume declined 4.1%. The company’s growth brands, Camel and Pall Mall, gained a strong cigarette market share of 2.6 percentage points, bringing their combined share to 12.7%. This drove the company’s total cigarette market share to 28.7%, up 0.4 percentage points. Camel, the company’s flagship brand, had a market ...

p style="text-align: left;"By Claus Vistesen: Copenhagenbr //pp style="text-align: left;"(please click on pictures for better viewing)br //pp style="text-align: left;"br //pp style="text-align: center;""Being a Keynesian means being a Keynesian in emboth/em the good and bad times."/p p style="text-align: center;"emAndres Velasco (Finance Minister in Chile) [1]/em/p pbr //ppIt has been a while since I last had a thorough look at Chile (a href="http://chileeconomy.blogspot.com/2008/10/chiles-economy-in-perspective-october.html"here/a and a href="http://chileeconomy.blogspot.com/2008/08/economic-growth-in-chile.html"here/a); more specifically, the last time I had Chile under the loop was in October 2008 and thus around the time when the global economy was about to enter two quarters (Q4-08 and Q1-09) of absolute horror. Whether we are past the worst at this point in time is debatable and I am, personally, skeptical with regards the narrative of second derivatives and green shoots, but it is hard to deny that it does represent a narrative and a fairly strong one too. In this context I thought ...

Smart Money Betting on Heavy Machinery Stocks Gaining in 2009

Joe Kunkle, The Investment U Research Team

One of the greatest assets you can have as a trader or investor is having the ability to spot trends, and use that information to draw conclusions about what will occur in the future.

I have long used the options market as a way of watching where the “smart money” is making bets. It has allowed me to foresee the collapse of financial stocks and the re-emergence of oil and commodity related stocks.

And from the signals I’m seeing, we may be on the verge of another big move.

Over the past few weeks, large volume bullish option trades have been indicating the expectation for a major recovery in heavy machinery stocks for the third quarter of 2009.

But we can’t really understand the significance of these

...

pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/PZKUEqKJlYSpdy4uCMnW0K4gQvM/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/PZKUEqKJlYSpdy4uCMnW0K4gQvM/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pAll week you will probably hear about "toxic assets" and a style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);" href="http://mast-economy.blogspot.com/2009/02/bernake-gets-it-just-right.html"the government's plan/a to rid the banks of these "bad" assets on their balance sheets.br /br /But several astute readers have already alerted us all:br /span class="content_of_comment" id="content_of_comment_434116"/spanblockquotespan class="content_of_comment" id="content_of_comment_434116"Today's "toxic assets" are tomorrow's "hot buys." The next scandal is going to be stories on wealthy Wall Streeters making a fortune buying "toxic" assets financed by the government as the real estate market recovers.br //span/blockquoteThat just might be the case. Here is one scenario that weaves a silver lining into all those assets the government just might be buying on our behalf...br /br /Take the example of Mike. He bought a small condo in the burbs of DC for $200,000 several years ago. The market was hot; he could not go wrong his agent said. He put ...

bReason for comment/bbrbr York Pharma announced today that it has returned flammazine/flammacerium to Solvay. pThe transaction was originally structured as a series of two payments, the first of which for €17 million was completed in July and the remainder of €11.5 million, to be completed by the end of the year. The first tranche of this transaction was funded by an asset-based loan provided by Fortress Credit Corporation, an offshoot of the large New York-based hedge fund Fortress Investment Group with the second being funded by other investors. pGiven the extremely difficult capital market circumstances of the last 6 months, York Pharma was unable to raise the second part of this transaction in cash and had instead, negotiated with Solvay a 'vendor note' to enable the transaction to complete and York to take full posession of the drug portfolio. However, Fortress decided in light of this to ...

In this portion of the economic cycle, we typically see all sorts of causes and reasons for fault. This time, its no different...br /br /We've seen "the fall of the U.S." theories...br /h1 style="font-style: italic;"span style="font-size:78%;"a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123051100709638419.html"As if Things Weren't Bad Enough, Russian Professor Predicts End of U.S./a/span/h1Its an interesting theory, but pretty light on the substance. This guy fails to take into consideration the actual climate in America.br /br /And of course "the death of free-market capitalism" calls...br /br /a href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/12/laissezfaire_capitalism_should.html"span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;"Laissez-Faire Capitalism Should Be as Dead as Soviet Communism/span/abr /br /Again, awfully light on substance. Its so easily to rip on free-market capitalism during recessions, but people often forget about the wealth created by capitalism which probably is the reason the writer had a job to begin with. Some like to have it both ways. Its easy to tear down ...

a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_T9VXVyuEITg/SUNq1diWT3I/AAAAAAAAAmk/bSjmELRaRnY/s1600-h/Cigarette.jpg"img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 231px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_T9VXVyuEITg/SUNq1diWT3I/AAAAAAAAAmk/bSjmELRaRnY/s320/Cigarette.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279180654902660978" //abr /Now that Barrack Obama is the president-elect, the United Stated will have the first smoking president in many years. Although he has made plans to quit smoking, he admits that he still hasn't yet stopped entirely. Will this have an effect on the consumption of cigarettes and tobacco? If you think so, and you have no objection to investing in cigarette stocks, you may want to consider the tobacco companies, especially because of their extremely high yields.br /br /Vector Group Ltd. (VGR) is a Florida based company that has numerous brands of cigarettes including Liggett, Grand Prix, Eve, Pyramid, USA and nicotine-free Quest. The stock has a PE of 15 a PEG of 1.25, and pays a yield of 11.7%.br /br /Reynolds American Inc. (RAI) makes and markets cigarettes and other ...

strongMonday:br //strongEconomic NAbr /Earnings H amp; R Block (HRB), Nat Semi (NSM), Pep Boys (PBY)br /br /strongTuesday:/strongbr /Economic Pending Home Sales (-2.3%)br /Earnings Analogic (ALOG), AutoZone (AZO), Kroger (KR), Toro (TTC), ADC Telecom (ADCT), Cooper (COO), Oxford (OXM), Pall (PLL), SAIC (SAI)br /br /strongWednesday:/strongbr /Economic Weekly Crude, Treasury Budget (-$193B)br /Earnings Korn/Ferry (KFY), CKE Restaurants (CKR), Greif (GEF), NCI Bldg (NCS)br /br /strongThursday:br //strongEconomic Weekly Claims, Import / Export, Trade Balance (-$54B)br /Earnings Ciena (CIEN), Costco (COST), Luluemon (LULU), Esterline (ESL), Martek (MATK), Teekay (TK)br /br /strongFriday:/strongbr /Economic PPI amp; Core (-1.8%, 0.2%), Retail Sales (-1.4%, -1.7%), Biz’ Invs (-0.1%), Michigan (58) Earnings NAdiv class="blogger-post-footer"http://stockweb.blogspot.com/atom.xml/div pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/SQk3ONGLysXPUUj8p5cpWPND6oI/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/SQk3ONGLysXPUUj8p5cpWPND6oI/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/Stockweb?a=IveUgyz9"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/Stockweb?d=41" border="0"/img/a /div

Stock markets in Asia and Europe opened sharply lower after Lehman Brothers (LEH) announces bankruptcy. Another news is about Merrill Lynch (MER) which was surprisingly bought by Bank of America (BAC). From Big five financial firms only Goldman Sachs (GS) and Morgan Stanley (MS) remain. These two will release earnings results this week.Monday:Economic Empire (1.4) CU & IP (79.6%, -0.3%)Earnings Titan Machinery (TITN), Discover (DFS), Pall (PLL)Tuesday:Economic CPI & Core (0.2%, 0.0%), FOMC StatementEarnings Best Buy (BBY), CBRL (CBRL), Goldman (GS), Kroger (KR), AAR (AIR), Adobe (ADBE), Darden (DRI)Wednesday:Economic Weekly Crude, Bldg P’s & Starts (925K, 950K)Earnings General Mills (GIS), Morgan Stanley (MS), CKE (CKR), Dress Barn (DBRN)Thursday:Economic Weekly Claims, Leading Indicators (-0.2%), Philly Fed (-10.0)Earnings Carnival (CCL), ConAgra (CAG), FedEx (FDX), Cintas (CTAS), Oracle (ORCL), Palm (PALM)http://stockweb.blogspot.com/atom.xml

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