Trimming The Tree of Apple Profits

With the market ramping and Apple and other tech stocks leading the way, I sold a portion of Apple in many client accounts on Friday as it crossed $160. I completed sales only in accounts where the position size was pushing towards 4%. I have a detailed spreadsheet on Apple and no matter how much […]

NII Holdings Falls Sharply on Brazil News

Yesterday NII Holdings (NIHD), one of Northlake’s long positions, fell by more than 5% on huge volume. At one point in the morning the shares were off over 10%. NIHD operates Nextel service in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Peru, and Chile. I heard of several reasons for the sharp sell-off. Most of the concern centers on […]

Ukraine Elections Positive For Central European Media Enterprises

Ukraine held elections for the third time in four years over the weekend. The pro-Western block of parties that originally formed the Orange Revolution were the surprise winners by a slight margin. Former Prime Minster Yulia Tymoshenko’s party produced the upside surprise bringing in over 30% of the vote, possibly coming in first place. With […]

More Debate on Comcast

Following my post yesterday on Comcast, my buddy, hedge fund manager and soon to be anchor on the Fox Business Channel, Cody Willard, replied with a bearish view of the stock. Among Cody’s objections to my ongoing bullish stance on Comcast is, “$14 billion of market cap losses for wasting tens of billions of shareholder […]

Mea Culpa on Comcast

Mea culpa. Comcast made a new low for this latest down move yesterday, falling more than 3% on what looks like its highest volume day ever before recovering slightly to lose 2.7%. This action occurred after the stock rose a whopping 11 cents in Tuesday’s 335 point advance in the Dow. I feel your pain. […]

Forget The Time Warner Breakup Stories

I want to echo the comments about Time Warner made yesterday by Chris Atayan, my RealMoney.com colleague. Despite renewed speculation, a breakup of the company is unlikely to add value in the near-term. Time Warner is overanalyzed and sum of the parts has been modeled exhaustively. If the sum of the parts were significantly higher […]

Will Consumer Slowdown Cut Into Comcast’s Growth?

Cable stocks have been poor performers all year. Things started badly when Comcast raised it s capital spending forecast in conjunction with its 4Q06 earnings reported. The second hit came with 2Q07 results when basic and broadband subscriber growth disappointed pretty much across the board. Access line losses for AT&T and Verizon, basic subscriber losses […]

About That iPhone Price Cut

The following quotes come from a new report on the iPhone from Bernstein Research: “Apple could conceivably sell iPhone hardware at a substantial loss while generating greater profit per iPhone than it does from the highest end iPod…..this potentially gives Apple a storng incentive to price the iPhone aggressively to drive sales, even at the […]

Central European Media Enterprises Gains Control of Ukraine License

Central European Media Enterprises announced earlier this week that it had gained control of its broadcasting license in Ukraine. This is very good news as license control provides added protection against emerging market political and regulatory risk. CETV now controls its licenses in every country in which it operates (Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, Romania, […]

New iPods Overshadowed By iPhone Price Cut

As the Apple iPod event was going on yesterday, I posted this comment on RealMoney.com: “New colors for the Shuffle, a redesigned Nano focused on an improved video experience, higher capacity classic iPods topping out at 160GB, and iPod Touch – it seems like an iPhone without the phone. Seems like a very good lineup […]