exsqueeze me

by StockJockey

Monday, February 05, 2007

We hate to interrupt your trading day with a bloody tussle…

The CROCS (CROX-NASDAQ) saga continues…

The Robert Baird upgrade today is breathtaking. Not only because they got off the fence from neutral to buy...but they raised their price target from $47 to $80. They must have been out to lunch for a while.

A nice round $100 target might have gotten them more publicity...Blodget-style.

Maybe the bears should call PETA...this story is as abusive as anything we have seen

Speaking of animals...guess who was buying the snot out of it in the fourth-quarter of 2006?

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The content contained in this blog represents the opinions of 1440 Wall Street. This commentary in no way constitutes a solicitation of business or investment advice. It is intended solely for the entertainment of the reader, and the author. No positions in securities or funds mentioned above.

Birthday Boy

by StockJockey

Thursday, February 01, 2007

We survived him. Are you richer than a year ago?

Ben is one

Did you like Moneyball?

Here is Bernanke’s favorite book

Like Greenspan, who honed his math skills by poring over baseball statistics as a boy, Bernanke was a rabid fan whose favorite book was the novel The Universal Baseball Association Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., by Robert Coover. He taught himself calculus, was sports editor of his high school paper, was class valedictorian and got the state’s highest SAT score the year he took the test. USA Today
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The content contained in this blog represents the opinions of 1440 Wall Street. This commentary in no way constitutes a solicitation of business or investment advice. It is intended solely for the entertainment of the reader, and the author.

Buyer’s Remorse

by StockJockey

Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Time flies...we had lost track of this story. But the intrepid Matthew Goldstein has long been on the case.

Durus Manager Gets Hard Time

Scott Sacane, the disgraced hedge fund manager who claimed to have mistakenly accumulated a controlling stake in a tiny biotech company, is going to jail.

A U.S. judge sentenced Sacane on Tuesday to three years in federal prison. Sacane pleaded guilty in December 2005 to charges that he manipulated shares of two small biotech companies, Esperion and Aksys, by failing to disclose that his hedge fund had purchased huge equity stakes in both companies.

Sacane’s sentencing comes nearly four years after his hedge fund, once worth $500 million, belatedly disclosed that it had amassed a 77% ownership stake in Aksys, a dialysis machine manufacturer, and a 33% stake in Esperion, a drug manufacturer.

Sacane initially said the fund “inadvertently” became the biggest shareholder in both companies, and denied doing anything wrong. He never explained, however, why Durus continued to keep buying shares even after cutting agreements with Aksys and Esperion to halt the purchases.
thestreet.com

The names change...but the stories are always the same

“I was just trying to make some money” ---Bunker Hunt

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The content contained in this blog represents the opinions of 1440 Wall Street. This commentary in no way constitutes a solicitation of business or investment advice. It is intended solely for the entertainment of the reader, and the author.

Here’s the Skinny

by StockJockey

Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Herb wins in a Smackdown...his biggest victory in some time.

NutriSystem Offers Mixed Guidance for Fourth Quarter and 2007 First Quarter Earnings

HORSHAM, Pa. (AP)—Diet company NutriSystem Inc. said Tuesday its fourth quarter earnings per share will top Wall Street estimates, but its 2007 first quarter results will not match analyst projections.

The Philadelphia-area company said its earnings will be between 50 cents per share and 53 cents per share for the quarter and revenues between $131 million and $133 million.

Analysts polled by Thomson Financial are expecting fourth quarter earnings of 47 cents per share on revenue of $127.8 million.

For the year, the company said its earnings will fall between $2.26 and $2.29 per share with revenue ranging between $566 million and $568 million.

For the first quarter of 2007, however, the company is projecting earnings lower than analysts’ estimates. The company said its earnings per share should be between 82 cents and 86 cents with revenue between $200 million and $210 million.

Analysts are predicting earnings of 94 cents per share on revenue of $214 million for the first quarter.

“With the pursuit of new market segments combined with unseasonably higher media rates, we expect to see moderately higher customer acquisition costs in first quarter 2007 on a year-over-year basis,” said James D. Brown, executive vice president and chief financial officer.
AP

December 13, 2006
NutriSystem: Bloated Pig?
Herb Greenberg is back at it...he must be a Jets fan given his distaste for the shares of NutriSytem Inc. (NTRI-NASDAQ). UTC

This one is going to leave a mark

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The content contained represents the opinions of 1440 Wall Street. This commentary in no way constitutes a solicitation of business or investment advice. It is intended solely for the entertainment of the reader, and the author. Underthecounter has no positions in any securities mentioned .

Turf Talk

by StockJockey

Mayor Bloomberg is long NYC.....

These look like fat years on Wall Street. In 2006, the city’s biggest financial firms made more than thirty billion dollars in profits. Trading volume on the major exchanges is climbing, while the merger market is booming. And bankers and traders have reaped the benefits, earning close to twenty-five billion dollars in bonuses last year. Yet over the past few months, amid this bounty, a chorus of Cassandras has emerged. “The United States is losing its leading competitive position,” a private-sector commission on capital markets said in a November report, and last week Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Senator Charles Schumer released a study arguing that New York City’s financial dominance was being eroded, thus putting tens of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of jobs at risk. These reports argue that overzealous regulation—as epitomized by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the anti-fraud law passed after the Enron and WorldCom scandals—is making the U.S. an increasingly unalluring place to do business. Unless such regulatory excesses are curbed, they say, New York will soon lose its position as the world’s financial capital.