As I mentioned in the Friday Review video, I did not trade at all last week. Truth be told, I barely looked at the markets; with the exception of that one brief trade for the Challenge Project (with due nods to Anthony Davian on that UNG trade he mentioned in Twitter)
ANF had a second straight month of sales that beat Street expectations. I should probably thank Professor Joel Greenblatt for this one. I took his class at Columbia Business School a few years ago and if I recall correctly, his sister came in to talk about retail stocks. Prior to that day, I always thought retail stocks were "unanalyzable." Man, was I wrong.
I usually begin these newsletters, and all issues of “Airelon's Market Tactics”, with general introductory comments that applies to the trading week ahead. After this, I usually discuss my “dividend investing” outlook, after which I discuss my “trading” outlook for the next week, concluding with a discussion of portfolio management; as it relates to the Model Portfolio that benchmarks the results of this newsletter.
It's pretty clear now that PALM has been a successful short. The question now is what is this company worth now that the company has admitted that their handset is not selling well at Verizon. Now that their ruse of blaming Chinese New Years for halted handset production is exposed what do we do with the short position now? In this recap, I attempt to value the company under two scenarios - as a going concern, and as a liquidation.
By now you've seen the implosion in PALM. I will have a detailed report out before the market opens on Monday. I am reviewing all of my assumptions on the stock and now not only analyzing it from the point of view of a going concern, but I am also looking at liquidation value, or M&A value. More to come.
Steve Wynn is a mad genius. Seriously, the guy is mad as a hatter on his earnings calls, ranting about the government, the deficit, and high tax rates. The other half the time on the calls he spends marketing his properties and disparaging his competition. He's like a Donald Trump that actually knows how to make money in the casino business. In other words, I love the guy. Nothing to change my investment thesis here - take a look at some of the metrics on this sheet - things are getting very good at Wynn.
MGM now reports a lot more detail than they previously did. Lots of good information here - surprising that low-end property like New York-New York is performing so well.
LVS reports lots of detail on their operations - you can see it here in my standard earnings reporting format. Some of these graphs look quite good- trends are improving.
This is the extensive monthly report, covering Vegas airport arrivals, Nevada gaming numbers, Macau arrivals, Macau gaming revenue, and Atlantic City gaming revenue.
Last week, we saw that the Federal Reserve raised the rate on an emergency lending 'window'. The Fed Fund Prime Rate remains unchanged. The U.S. Dollar skyrocketed, and then fell back towards it's range of the previous day. What does this all mean for equities? How does it affect my trading outlook? Does this change my previous broad economic outlook?
I discuss this all in this 9 page issue Airelon's Market Tactics ...