Seeking Alpha

Thank you and good morning to everyone. With me today are Dr. Ali

For the last three weeks I've been writing a series of articles that focus on buying stocks prior to earnings. It's a strategy that I've played for quite sometime, therefore I decided to write a series of articles that take investors week-by-week through my actual purchases. Every quarter I use a small percentage of my portfolio for playing earnings, and in this quarter I used $20,000 as the starting amount. After the first week, we were down because of the Google (GOOG) miss. But in week two we returned approximately 11% and entered
Complete Story » By Ganaxi Small Cap Movers:

We covered Thursday's noteworthy insider buys and sells in a prior article earlier today. The following are additional noteworthy insider trades reported on Thursday, but limited to extremely large-cap or mega-cap companies. Mega-caps are usually the biggest companies in the investment universe, and are generally household names. There is no exact definition, but generally they are thought of as companies with market-caps in excess of $100 billion, which number between 80 and 90 among U.S. exchange traded equities. For the purposes of this article, we have extended that range to over $50 billion, and present below the most notable trades reported on Thursday among extremely large-cap or mega-cap stocks; notable based on the dollar amount sold, the number of insiders selling, and based on whether the overall buying or selling represents a strong pick-up based on historical buying and selling in the stock (for more info on how to interpret

Company Description (from recent 10-K)

W.W. Grainger, Inc. (GWW) is a is a broad-line distributor of maintenance, repair and operating supplies and other related products and services used by businesses and institutions primarily in the United States and Canada, with an expanding presence in Asia and Latin America.

W.W. Grainger is a dividend aristocrat, having raised its dividend for 40 consecutive years.

A 10-year summary of Sales, Earnings Before Interest and Tax (EBIT), Earnings per share (EPS), yearly high and low stock price, corresponding high and low P/E (calculated by dividing the high and low price by the EPS for the year), and average P/E (average of high and low P/E) is shown below. Prices are adjusted for stock splits.

Key 10-year data for W.W. Grainger

Year

Sales (in Millions)

EBIT (in Millions)

EPS

High Price

Low Price

High P/E

Low P/E

Average P/E

2011

8080

1050

9.07

190

130

The past year has been tough for BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIMM):

• While Apple's (AAPL) iPhone and Google's (GOOG) Android gained market share in the U.S. in the most recent quarter, RIM saw its market share decline from 19% to 16% of U.S. smartphone customers according to the most recent ComScore numbers reported by CNET.
• Blackberry faced service outages and delays around the world in October.
• The company announced it would take a $485 million charge in December related to promotional action it would be taking due to its high inventory of Playbook tablets.
• And their co-CEO's recently resigned.

And as the stock price has declined on the Nasdaq from $70.54 last February to a closing price of $16.88 at the time of this article, the hope of a takeover by a larger company may have been on some investors' minds. These hopes may have dwindled last February when

At this risk of beating a dead horse, I reiterate that I don't see how the European situation comes to a happy conclusion. Conditions in Greece appear to be deteriorating rapidly. Via Athens News, retail sales are in freefall:

Retail sales by volume fell 8.9 percent year-on-year in November after a 10.8 percent drop in October, statistics service data showed on Tuesday.

Households, burdened by austerity measures to plug deficits and rising unemployment, have cut back on spending.

Consumer confidence has also been hurt by a climb in the jobless rate to 17.7 percent in the third quarter.

Officially, hope springs eternal:

"Increasing unemployment and austerity are likely to continue weighing on disposable incomes and consumer demand in the first months of 2012. However, a positive conclusion of the PSI deal and the approval of the second bailout package could provide a kind of positive shock to business and consumer

By Eric Dutram

The weak economy in the second half of 2011 wasn’t exactly welcomed news for those in the copper industry. Prices for the red metal slumped from just under $4.5/lb. in late July to just over $3.0/lb. in early Autumn. Yet, thanks to some encouraging data on the housing front, as well as hopes for a soft landing in China—or more construction related stimulus in the nation—copper prices have come storming back in recent months, pushing prices back up close to the key $4/lb. level to start the year.

While obviously this has been good news for those who are holding onto copper ETNs such as JJC—prices of this note have gained close to 21% in the past three months—copper mining equities have also been huge beneficiaries as well. Most securities in this space have seen double digit gains as well, spurred by the prospect of higher profit

I keep reading that some people want to have the Federal Reserve begin a new round of quantitative easing -- QE3.

I see nothing in the financial figures that calls for more quantitative easing.

For one, there seems to be no pressure on interest rates. Looking over the last 13-week period, the yield on the 10-year US Treasury (constant maturity) has remained relatively constant. The weekly average for the week of November 4, 2011 was 2.07 percent; for the week of January 27, 2012 the weekly average was 2.01. And the market yield on 10-year Treasuries has been below 2.00 percent all of this week.

The European sovereign debt situation has certainly contributed to this weakness in yields. Hence, there does not seem to be any demand pressure on interest rates at this time.

Economic growth continues to be modest and consequently is not adding any demand pressure on rates.

I have a new working hypothesis as to the first moving cause of the boom that led to bust of 2007-2008. It is the structure of the European banking system. Yes, the problem began in Europe, not the United States, and it is the same problem that caused the boom and bust in European housing and the European sovereign debt crisis. I will spell that out shortly. But first let me forecast that the ECB is on the case and is in the process of correcting that original problem, as well as providing liquidity to the banking sector and succor to the sovereign debt market. If the ECB is successful, it will rid the world of this economic scourge that has cost Europe and the U.S. so dearly. One can only hope that the American authorities will take similar actions to fix the American transmission mechanism that permitted the European

Today Estee Lauder (EL) reported its second quarter earnings. The earnings release fell short of expectations as the company warned about a revenue slowdown for the second half of its fiscal 2012. Shares opened down 6% but recovered intra-day to end the day down 2.5% in a very bullish market. Despite the fall today the shares remain within reach of their all time high of $60.

Second quarter results
The second quarter, which includes the holiday season, is traditionally the company's strongest quarter. Sales increased 10% to $2.74 billion, net earnings were up 15% to $397 million with earnings per share coming in at $1.00 in line with expectations. Revenues grew 8% in the US, 5% in Europe and 21% in Asia.
Earnings for first half year came in at $1.70, up from $1.34 last year. Traditionally Estee Lauder makes about 80% of its profit in the first half of

Alliant Techsystems (ATK) has seen sales increase over the last decade due to the U.S. military demand for ammunition, explosives, pyrotechnics and rocket motors for use in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as training purposes. The stock though has not moved much in recent years trading around the $60 mark for most of the last year although it hit a peak of close to $76 in May of last year.

ATK reported its most recent quarterly results after the market closed on February 2nd. Alliant Techsystems, while it does have a growing customer base, still is heavily reliant on defense spending. It also has some contracts with the Federal government that make up a great deal of its revenue. The company has suffered the loss of one of these contracts - the one to run the Radford explosives plant - and faces stiff competition to keep the ammunition production one

Simon Property Group (SPG)

Q4 2011 Earnings Call

February 03, 2012 11:00 am ET

Executives

Shelly J. Doran - Vice President of Investor Relations

David E. Simon - Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of Executive Committee

Richard S. Sokolov - President, Chief Operating Officer, Director and Member of Executive Committee

Stephen E. Sterrett - Chief Financial Officer and Executive Vice President

Analysts

Quentin Velleley - Citigroup Inc, Research Division

Michael Bilerman - Citigroup Inc, Research Division

Jonathan Habermann - Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Research Division

David Harris

Christy McElroy - UBS Investment Bank, Research Division

Steve Sakwa - ISI Group Inc., Research Division

Paul Morgan - Morgan Stanley, Research Division

Alexander David Goldfarb - Sandler O'Neill + Partners, L.P., Research Division

Ki Bin Kim - Macquarie Research

Jeffrey J. Donnelly - Wells Fargo Securities, LLC, Research Division

Carol L. Kemple - Hilliard Lyons, Research Division

Cedrik Lachance - Green

Back in January I covered the case of Internet Patents Corporation (PTNT, formerly INSW). Internet Patents, then known as InsWeb, had sold its operating business to Bankrate (RATE) in October for $65 million. The stock jumped some 42% on the news, drifted downward, and then rose another 8% on January 11th when the company announced a $5/share special dividend.

The question, as I noted in my earlier piece, was just how much cash PTNT would wind up with -- and how many shares would be outstanding, given the company's existing stock option plan. On Monday the company filed a 8-K with the SEC, updating its share count to 7.06 million, with 823,000 options still outstanding with an exercise price below $8.25. (The stock is trading at $8.09 Friday morning, as I write this.) It also promised an additional update "on or about" February 15th.

Thus, using the new share count

Macerich (MAC)

Q4 2011 Earnings Call

February 3, 2012 1:30 p.m. ET

Executives

Art Coppola - CEO and Chairman of the Board of Directors

Ed Coppola - President

Tom O’Hern - Senior Executive VP and Chief Financial Officer

Randy Brant - Executive VP, Real Estate.

Analysts

Craig Schmidt – Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Quentin Velleley – Citi

Paul Morgan – Morgan Stanley

Christy McElroy – UBS

Todd Thomas – KeyBanc Capital Markets

Vincent Chao – Deutsche Bank

Steve Sakwa - ISI

Cedrik Lachance - Green Street Advisors

Alexander Goldfarb – Sandler O’Neill

Wes Golladay - RBC Capital Markets

Ben Yang – KBW

Tayo Okusanya - Jefferies & Co.

Michael Mueller – JPMorgan

Presentation