Comcast Corp. (CMCSK) gained slightly in morning trade to pressure a short-term level of resistance at $13.74 a day after the company's new debt issue got an investment grade rating from Standard & Poor's. The average forecast on the company's full-year earnings has inched up by 2 cents per share to $1.02 in the last month. Comcast is a Zacks#1 Rank ("Strong Buy") stock.

"CMCSK" Free Stock Analysis: Buy? Sell? Hold?Zacks Investment Research

We are increasingly asked about low risk individual stocks that may be suitable for an equity income allocation within a portfolio.  This is a general response to that question.

Before offering a prospect list in which you might find attractive ideas, we want to make it clear that diversification of sectors and individual securities is important; and that individual stocks involve more work to create and maintain in a portfolio than holding funds.  Generally, individual stock portfolios have higher risk due to concentration among a limited number of issues.  That higher risk could enable out-performance, but could also result lower performance than a diversified fund or index.

There are diversified equity income ETFs and mutual funds which should also be considered as alternatives to a portfolio of individual stocks.

We developed a filtered list of equity income prospects in two stages: (1) selection by Standard & Poor’s or Value Line for financial strength

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On Monday March 9, barely three months ago, I strongly recommended buying Diamond Offshore (NYSE: DO) as part of Money Morning’s “Buy, Sell, or Hold” feature.  Both the stock and the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index had both hit 52-week lows the Friday before.  But oil had already bottomed three weeks prior, and the lax fiscal and monetary policies of governments around the world seemed almost certain to promote reflation.

Additionally, since the earlier oil bottom, Diamond Offshore stock had been outperforming the market.

Diamond not only had compelling fundamentals, it sported an incredibly high dividend yield, particularly if you combined both the regular and the special dividend payouts. That made the stock a compelling buy.

Not only has Diamond Offshore’s stock turned around since that early-March recommendation, the U.S. stock market as a whole turned around.

Making an investment at a market bottom is a rare opportunity. It

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Your co-editor is in Oslo, Norway, after a brief spell in his native Dublin. The contrast is stark.  The Irish economy soared during the good years, helped by low European interest rates and an unusually bubbly property boom.

The fall from grace has been spectacular. Ratings agency Standard & Poor’s recently downgraded Ireland’s sovereign debt to AA with a negative outlook.

The problem is the Irish government is doing its best to emulate Team Obama’s ‘solution’ to the financial crisis: prop up failed banks with capital injections and transfer banks’ bad loans to the taxpayer. As a result, Ireland is expected to see its national debt climb to more than 120% of annual GDP – a level even higher than other AA-rated eurozone countries.

By contrast, in Norway the financial crisis feels like a distant event. Your co-editor has been mightily impressed by how well everything works here. And the Norwegians,

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An investor buys an idea and waits for that idea to materialize. It might take minutes, hours, days, sometimes even years for that idea to materialize. The longer the time frame, the more likely the idea will materialize profitably, according to an recent article in May/June 2009 issue CFA Institute Magazine.

After it cut its outlook on the United Kingdom’s triple-A credit rating to ‘negative’ from ’stable’, last week Standard & Poor’s raised worries that the United States could lose its “AAA” rating. On May 27, Moody’s Investors Service, another ratings agency, said the U.S. government’s AAA rating is stable despite the country’s swelling debt. But it did not completely rule out a downgrade.  

A reassessment of the economy and the government’s debt could put “negative pressure on the rating in the future.” The UK faces a 33% chance of a

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For Immediate Release

Chicago, IL - June 3, 2009 - Zacks Equity Research highlights Biogen Idec (BIIB) as the Bull of the Day and Eastman Chemical Company (EMN) the Bear of the Day. In addition, Zacks Equity Research provides analysis on DeVry Inc. (DV), General Motors (GM) and McGraw-Hill (MHP).

Full analysis of all these stocks is available at http://at.zacks.com/?id=2676.

Here is a synopsis of all five stocks:

Bull of the Day:

Biogen Idec (BIIB) posted solid results in the first quarter of 2009, despite the slowdown in Tysabri sales due to fears of PML. We think the Biogen core business will remain strong over the next several quarters. Tysabri prescriptions are showing an improvement and we believe will resume their previous pace shortly.

In the meantime, the name is significantly under-valued

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The S&P GSCI increased 19.67% in May, the most since September 1990.

 

In May, one of the broadest commodities indexes—the S&P GSCI—produced its biggest one-month gain since Iraq invaded Kuwait in September 1990.

The S&P GSCI increased 19.67% in the month. That compared to a gain of 22.94% in September 1990, according to Standard & Poor's, which released the results on Tuesday. (See table below.)

"Solid commodity gains in May were attributed to most commodities accelerating the recovery process from the sharp declines experienced during the second half of 2008 and first quarter of 2009," said Michael McGlone, S&P's director of commodity indexing in a statement.

Year-to-date through May, the S&P GSCI had registered a total return of 5.95%, led by strength in the energy and agriculture sectors.

Sparked by price increases in unleaded gas and crude oil, the S&P GSCI Energy Index increased 25.44% on the month for a

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The new investments play off of Standard & Poor’s Commodity Trends Indicator, or CTI, which bets on some commodity prices to rise and others to fall, depending on where the indicator’s caretakers think a commodity is in its price cycle. So at some point, the indicator might call for holding futures contracts that will profit from corn prices rising (a “long” position), while at the same time it might call for selling short silver futures to bet on a drop in the metal’s price.

The long/short indicator is well diversified. It tracks 16 commodities in six sectors: energy, industrial metals, precious metals, livestock, grains and “softs,” which includes cocoa, coffee, cotton and sugar. It can go long or short in all sectors except energy — the possibility of a catastrophe that could cause energy prices to skyrocket, such as a

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Standard & Poor's announced yesterday that DeVry Inc. (DV) will replace General Motors (GM) in the S&P 500 stock index after the close today. Obviously, the bankruptcy filing motivated the Committee to remove GM from the index, but the decision to add DeVry has many implications.First, the S&P 500 index is owned and maintained by Standard & Poor's, which is a division of McGraw-Hill (MHP). A Committee selects new companies for inclusion in the S&P 500 when there is a vacancy. The Committee seeks stocks that will provide fair representation of the many diverse industries in the U.S economy. The stocks should also meet the criteria of being large capitalization and having sufficient liquidity.The addition of DeVry should not come as a surprise. The stock was in the S&P MidCap 400, a fertile ground from which the Committee chooses new additions to ...

U.S. stocks rose on Tuesday as key housing data provided further evidence the U.S. recession was abating.

The National Association of Realtors said its Pending Home Sales Index, based on contracts signed in April, rose 6.7 percent for that month from March, well above economists’ average forecast of a 0.5 percent rise, according to a Reuters poll.

Shares of home builders increased after the data, as the Dow Jones U.S. Home Construction index .DJUSHB added 1.6 percent and the SPDR S&P Homebuilders ETF (XHB.P) gained 2 percent.

“This is our third monthly increase, and it really supports the bullish case,” said Jim Awad, managing director at Zephyr Management in New York.

“It is going to be incredibly good for the markets today, and it looks like what’s going to happen is that by the time it’s clear we’re in a recovery, the stock

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