Free Investing

Alan Brochstein, CFA submits:
With fewer than four months to go, stocks haven't differentiated themselves from cash as far as an impact on portfolios, returning just 0.4% as measured by the S&P 500. If you are like me and expecting stocks to make a nice run into the end of the year, or even if you are cautious, I think that smaller value stocks offer a great entry here. There are many stocks that trade close to tangible book value yet are profitable and have strong balance sheets. Poor liquidity since the "Flash Crash" is giving investors an opportunity in my opinon. While the summer has been tough on smaller stocks, YTD performance for Small-Cap Value (as measured by the Russell 2000 Value Index) has been pretty good: +3.84% through 9/3, despite an almost 10% pullback in the three months ending 8/31. So, Small-Cap Value seems capable of continuing to provide potential upside while also offering downside protection. I ran a screen of the Russell 3000 in order to highlight potential opportunities. Here is what I did:Complete Story »

Hickey and Walters (Bespoke) submit:
With earnings season kicking off this afternoon, we thought we'd highlight a few stats on the subject. Over at Bespoke Premium, we have a database with every single earnings report for US stocks going back to 2001. This totals out to 65,210 individual quarterly reports. Of these 65,210 earnings releases, 62% of companies beat EPS estimates while 25% missed. Sixty-two percent have also beaten revenue estimates, while 38% have missed. Predicting whether any random stock will go up or down on the day in response to its report is just about like a coin flip. Of the 65,210 reports in our database, the stock has gone higher on the day 32,563 times and lower on the day 32,251 times (396 times the stock closed the day flat). Unless you dig deeper into the numbers, it's basically hit or miss.Complete Story »

Jeff Pierce submits: Saw lots of semi’s showing up on my scans last night (click on chart to enlarge). A few with really solid charts that look like they have room to run are:

• Fairchild Semiconductor (FCS)
• Linear Technology (LLTC)
• Teradyne (TER)

Complete Story »

Trade Radar Operator submits: Stocks have been struggling lately, to put it mildly, but earnings season has been pretty decent. Stock prices in the tech sector has been especially weak but I don't believe tech deserves the cold shoulder. Here's why.I've been keeping track of some of the tech bellwethers as well as some of the smaller players.All in all, the results of this earnings season have been pretty positive.Complete Story »

Trade Radar Operator submits: Stocks have been struggling lately, to put it mildly, but earnings season has been pretty decent. Stock prices in the tech sector has been especially weak but I don't believe tech deserves the cold shoulder. Here's why.I've been keeping track of some of the tech bellwethers as well as some of the smaller players.All in all, the results of this earnings season have been pretty positive.Complete Story »

Phil Davis submits: Not such a good week! Last week was FANTASTIC. We had 28 winning trades out of 36 with an average gain of 42% on the winners and an average loss of 12% on the losers - now THAT’S A GOOD WEEK. We were stopped out of most of our bearish trades on Monday but we took a lot of new ones, which I’ll get into later... Of course, since we are rangish and play both ends, the good news is we still had our "losers" and puts that we sold on long positions. Those turned into huge winners in just 5 days:Complete Story »

Fairchild Semiconductor International Inc. (FCS)
Q2 2009 Earnings Call
July 16, 2009 9:00 am ETComplete Story »