earnings

This weekly newsletter is a gold-level post and follows up on my prediction early last month about 2012 being a period of margin compression in US companies, threatening the rally in stocks and mandating a rotation in investment style or…

Commercial banks and savings institutions insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) reported an aggregate profit of $35.3 billion in the third quarter of 2011, an $11.5 billion improvement from the $23.8 billion in net…

Our macro takeaway from the call is that Europe is rolling over. No normal September bounce from the seasonally slow August. The company also notes what they see as a temporary slowdown in China. Alcoa missed and the stock got hammered…

Globally, coincident data is already slowing visibly across the globe with headline PMI readings and trade data coming in steadily lower. In that sense we are up against the wall again only so shortly after the shock of 2008/09 and this…

Wow! Just came across this piece from the FT about the concerns of the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) of how European financial institutions have not reserved enough against potential credit losses on their Greece sovereign…

The debt ceiling debate has stalled and the possibility of default is no longer an outlier. Even so, budget cuts from a deficit deal would weaken consumer demand in the US, already slowed by unemployment. My expectation is that by next…

The problem with bailouts is that they allow companies with either poor economics or weak financial structures to compete on a more level playing field with stronger competitors.  The bailouts are like a subsidy which gives an unfair…

The final revision to Q1 US GDP was disappointing in the headline and composition.  It is mitigated on the margins, for investors, by the substantial upward revision in corporate profits. Growth was revised to 2.7% from 3.0%…

One of my good friends who runs a small investment boutique pointed me towards today's chart of the day from Bloomberg showing the flight phoenix of US corporates' profit margins. I know that the chart is difficult to read but you only…