These are their 66 favorite stocks which readers gave me last week as my birthday presents. I’m still mulling on them to see which ones I prefer. I’ll add more information to this Excel spreadsheet tomorrow — like P/E ratios, dividend yield, earnings growth, etc. For now, simply eyeing the chart is useful:
| 3M | MMM |
| AES Corp. | AES |
| Affiliated Managers Group | AMG |
| Akamai | AKAM |
| Altima Resources Ltd. | ARSLF |
| Amgen | AMGN |
| Apple | AAPL |
| Astrazeneca PL | AZN |
| Ball Corp. | BLL |
| Banco Santander |
SAN |
| Blackstone Group LP | BX |
| Borealis Exploration | BOREF |
| Boston Beer Company | SAM |
| Cabot Microelectronics | CCMP |
| Celgene | CELG |
| Cheniere Energy | LNG |
| Chipmos Technologies | IMOS |
| Con Edison | ED |
| Constellation Brands | STZ |
| Deere and Co. | DE |
| Emerge Energy Services | EMES |
| Enterprise Product Partners | EPD |
| Eurasian Minerals | EMXX |
| Extra Space Storage | EXR |
| First Republic Bank | FRC |
| Franklin Financialá |
FRNK |
| Gaslog Ltd. | GLOG |
| General Electric | GE |
| Gold ETF | GLD |
| GOOG | |
| Gramercy Property Trust | GPT |
| GTT Communications | GTT |
| Hawaiian Holdings | HA |
| India Small Cap index ETF | SCIF |
| Invensense Inc | IVN |
| Juniper Networks | JNPR |
| Knightsbridge Tankers Ltd. | VLCCF |
| Level 3 | LVLT |
| Line Energy | LINE |
| Mannkind Corporation | MNKD |
| Mazor Robotics | MZOR |
| Monitise | MONIF |
| Nanosphere | NSPH |
| Netflix | NFLX |
| Nimble Storage | NMBL |
| Northstar Realty Finance | NRF |
| Nova Gold Trading | NG |
| NPS Pharmaceuticals | NPSP |
| Oceanagold Corp. | OCANF |
| Packaging Corp of America | PKG |
| Platinum ETF | PPLT |
| Qualcomm | QCOM |
| Repligen Corp. | RGEN |
| RR Donnelley and Sons | RRD |
| Sandisk | SNDK |
| Schlumberger | SLB |
| Silver Wheaton | SLW |
| Softbank | SFTBY |
| SolarCity | SCTY |
| Sunopta | STKL |
| Tesla Motors | TSLA |
| Trinity Industries | TRN |
| Valero energy Corporation | VLO |
| Verizon | VZ |
| X | US Steel |
World’s greatest speed bump. Funny video. Click here.
Weekend reading:
+ A profile on Apple’s Jim Cook, titled “Making Apple His Own”
Credit Minh Uong/The New York Times
An excerpt:
Michael A. Cusumano, a professor in the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T., said he thought Apple no longer had the juice to create the world-beating product it needs. Professor Cusumano, who is working on a book about innovation, visited Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., last fall and has talked to a half-dozen current and former employees about the company culture. He concluded that Apple without Mr. Jobs lacks a visionary to synthesize disparate ideas into a magical whole.
“Jobs would figure out how to put the pieces together,” Professor Cusumano said. “Everything just filtered through his eyes.”
“I think it’s going to be very difficult for them to come up with the next big thing,” he added. “They’ve lost their heart and soul.”
For the full article, click here.
+ Arachnid Phobia. A fascinating look into the difficulty of diagnosing and curing a woman’s aching medical problem. What looks like a spider bite and acts like a spider bite but isn’t a spider bite? Click here.
+ The era of cloud computing. Analysts estimate that over the next six years 90 percent of new spending on Internet and communications technologies will be on cloud-based technology.A special section from the New York Times.
For the full section, click here.
+ Threat Grows From Liver Illness Tied to Obesity. Yubelkis Matias is 19, 5-foot-5, weighs 200 lbs and lives with lives with fatty liver disease, which is not curable with medicine. “I’m on a roller coaster,” she said. “I eat healthy, then not healthy — pizza, McDonalds, the usual. My doctor told me I have to quit all of that. But it’s cheap, and it’s always there.”
For the full piece, click here.
Italy’s Amalfi coast. Pretty and neat. Wall Street Journal photos: Click here.
The Great ComeUppance. From the WSJ:
Maybe going on strike wasn’t the best way for London taxi drivers to protest Uber, the Internet-based car service invading from Silicon Valley. When riders couldn’t get cabs last week, the number signing up for Uber soared to more than eight times the normal rate.
Britain’s Skills Minister Matt Hancock posted a wry comment on Twitter: “Does anyone have details of this #Uber app everyone’s talking about? It sounds awesome. I’d never heard of it until today . . .”
This stuff is seriously delicious:
They have variations of Smart Balance, which I eat because it’s meant to be better for me than butter. It’s made by a company called Boulder Brands (BDBD). They’ve sold a heck of a lot of it and their sales are skyrocketing:
Their stock has done well.
But their profits are all over the place. Here’s net income:
Strikes me that someone like Whitewave Foods (WWAV) ought to buy Boulder Brands and manage them properly. Perfect fit.
For fun, I checked the ingredients on the “Light Butter.” I love the line: Ingredients not found in regular butter.” Basically everything except milk and butter.
Favorite New Yorker cartoons this week:
Harry Newton whose Internet browsers have been hit by a strange virus. They keep popping up sites I didn’t ask for and don’t want to visit. Norton Internet Security is blocking most of the problems. I’ve also tried MalwareBytes Anti-Malware. It’s annoying. I don’t have a solution. Does anyone?
Years ago, I argued that Iraq should break into three countries — one for the Shiites, one for the Sunnis and Kurdistan. That solution still seems logical. The history of post World War II has been breaking countries apart — from Czechoslovakia (two countries) to Yugoslavia (seven countries).
Harry,
We always use two services: MalwareBytes and Spybot free edition. It is OK to run them at the same time. They each seem to catch different bugs.
jeff
I prefer margarine made with olive oil…I only use real butter for cooking. Don’t use it often, but, when I want flavor…I use salted butter.
Have you tried AVAST Internet Security? This is highly rated…I like it. I used Malewarebytes until it completely stopped working for me..won’t even start-up….have been days waiting for MB to answer my trouble report.
Look for tools specific to fixing browser hijacking. Also, you may need to run something like rkill.
Caution: Don’t eat foods that have ingredients that you can’t pronounce and there are conflicting reports on the value of Omega 3
Harry, Don’t eat that Smart Balance butter!! That stuff is terrible for you. Big misconception out there in regards to butter: http://www.thehealthyhomeeconomist.com/there-is-nothing-smart-about-smart-balance/