January personal income 1% vs. 0.4% est. Personal spending 0.2% vs. 0.4% est. PCE core price index 0.1% vs. 0.2% est.
January pending homse sales –2.8% vs. –2.2% est.
Short-selling uptick rule after a stock is down 10% goes into effect today. Link
AMZN – Are Amazon’s sales-tax free days numbered? Link
AAPL – COO says company looking to develop lower priced iPhone offerings and tablet market will be much bigger than PCs. Link
AMZN – 26 year old writer makes millions selling ebooks. Link
AMZN – The 26 year old writer’s blog post on how she got rich. Link
-Revenue $760M in 2010 vs. $33M in 2009
-Received $6B take-over bid in December 2010 from Google
-Instead raised $950M in financing
-4000 employees and 565 cities at end of 2010 vs. 120 employees and 30 cities at end of 2009
-overseas revenue $285M in 2010 with 75% of the employee base
-national deals 12% of revenue in Q4 2010
-51 million email subscribers with a goal of 150 million by end of 2011
-hopes for $1B of new revenue from new products launched in 2011, not just daily email
Source: WSJ
Q4 GDP 2.8% vs. 3.4% est. Price index 0.4% vs. 0.3% est.
Consumer sentiment 77.5 vs. 75.1 est., 75.1 prior
SNE – Sony drops the price of the PSP from $170 to $130. Link
DMD GOOG – Google launches new search engine ranking algorithm aimed at content farms. Link Link2
BA – Boeing wins $30B Air Force tanker contract. Link
London Stock Exchange halted due to technical issues. Link
Hugh Henry’s short Japan presentation. Link
Mary Meeker on the state of USA Inc. Link
CCL – Carnival executives sell stock on rising oil prices. Link
NYSE margin debt at 2 year high. Link
GOOG NFLX – NYPost says Google may spend $100M on content to launch UK Netflix competitor. Link
Jobless claims 391K vs. 405K est. Prior revised to 413K from 410K
Durable goods 2.7% vs 3.0% est., –2.5% prior
OSTK – Google lowers search ranking for Overstock.com. Link
Saudi Arabia overs $36 billion to quell protests. Link
SHLD – Herb Greenberg on Sear’s hiring a new CEO. Link
New home sales 284K vs. 310K est.
AAPL – Touch panel yield supply issues for iPad 2. Link
SAC hired golfers so their traders can play with corporate executives. Link
Reuters article on the Feds investigating SAC Capital. Link
FTNT – IBD profiles Fortinet. Link
NFLX – Netflix worried about meter-ed internet access billing. Link
February consumer confidence 70.4 vs. 65 est., 60.6 prior
AMZN NFLX – Amazon.com Prime instant video streaming goes live to compete with Netflix. Link
Corn inventories drop to 1974 low. Link
Alibaba falls on storefront fraud. Link
AAPL – Video of Steve Jobs walking to his car from cancer center. Painful to watch. Link
GMCR – Green Mountain announces K-cup deal with Dunkin’ Donuts. Link
AAPL – Rumors of iPhone 5 and iPad 2 delays. Link
SINA – Good presentation on Sina’s Weibo. Link
AMZN NFLX – More details on Amazon’s video streaming movie studio deal. Link
AAPL – Apple iPad2 event on March 2nd. Link
China raises bank reserve rate by 50bps. Link
AAPL – U.S. anti-trust enforcers looking at Apple’s 30% cut subscription terms. Link
Picture of President Obama having a toast with tech leaders in California. Link
Buffett says pricing power is more important than management. Link
“The single most important decision in evaluating a business is pricing power,” Buffett told the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in an interview released by the panel last week. “If you’ve got the power to raise prices without losing business to a competitor, you’ve got a very good business. And if you have to have a prayer session before raising the price by 10 percent, then you’ve got a terrible business.”
-Mr. Cohen expressed the view that it was important to make concentrated bets and have conviction in your very best ideas, explaining that most SAC portfolio managers tend to run with their largest positions at 10 percent of their portfolio
-“Any time I get into a position, I’ll look at the chart first,” he said. “I always default to the chart. It is critical for entry points”
-But he says he still watches the screens all day and is always reacting, tending to make changes when things are moving against him. “I spend most the day watching my losers because if those are being managed correctly the winners take care of themselves”
-He manages risk a number of different ways, he said, including using Barra risk models and constantly monitoring his net exposures. He says he hedges with S&P futures “all day,” and although they are a positive driver of profits he makes most of his returns come from individual stock ideas
-“Leverage, concentration and illiquidity are the three things that can kill you,” he said. SAC’s big losses came from new areas that they had entered, like corporate debt. The firm got bigger for the sake of getting bigger, he lamented, and now realizes that they can’t do everything. Quoting his father, Mr. Cohen said, “A shoemaker makes shoes. You have to stick with what you’re good at”
-As for the current market he described it as “grinding every day.” But “underneath stocks are exploding, and everything I’m seeing today looks bullish,” he said. “I’m not going to get negative just for the sake of being negative”
Source
Jobless claims 410K vs. 410K est. Prior revised to 385K vs. 383K
CPI 0.4% vs. 0.3% est. Ex-food/energy 0.2% vs. 0.1%
AAPL – Apple secures 60% of global touch panel capacity. Link
AAPL – Apple’s new 30% net cut of iPhone app subscription revenue is angered music subscription app developers. Link
MMI – Walt Mossberg reviews Atrix 4G smartphone/laptop dock. Link
SBUX GMCR – CEO of Starbucks internal memo on single-serve business. Link
AAPL – Apple is expected to have strong notebook shipments in Q1. Link
NVDA – Nvidia’s Tegra road-map. Link
SINA – Times on China’s Twitter clone, Weibo. Link
NVDA QCOM – Qualcomm wins LG chip socket from Nvidia. Link
VZ T – Verizon iPhone unit sales barely beating AT&T unit sales. Link