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Worse than the earnings decline in my eyes is the increase in stock buybacks

Here's an alternate view. A company that is buying back its own shares is saying one of two things:
- It believes it will be able to sell them at a profit later (i.e. that the price is going to rise)
- It needs them for executive compensation and will not be able to get them cheaper before it needs them (i.e. that the price is going to rise)

Walmart pulled a similar trick back around mid November last year. They announced they we going to have a rough quarter which dropped their stock price by 10%. Then they announced a $20b stock buyback - and got 10% more stock for their $20b. I got in at $58.00. ;)

Wall Street still wants to see Apple and Microsoft to have good growth numbers, Apple especially. Analysts are expecting Apple to have an average annual earnings growth rate of 15%. From the same site Microsoft is expected to grow it's earnings at just over 8%.

Not sure where you are getting your data. http://www.nasdaq.com/markets/...

Can you please post your employer's stock symbol, so I can short their stock?

Here you go

you can really print all the money you want with no downside

Never mind that the annual deficit is at a seven-year low.

http://www.nasdaq.com/article/us-annual-budget-deficit-remains-near-7year-low-in-june-20150713-00726

The Waltons wealth did not come from their employees payroll. The Waltons wealth is in shares of the company.

It's that and it's money they didn't pay to their employees.

Walmart pays a dividend.
More than 50% of Walmart shares are held by Walton family members.
Walmart has 3.226 billion shares outstanding.
In 2014, Walmart paid a quarterly dividend of 48 cents, or $1.92 per share for the year.

So for 2014 alone, the Walton family collected approximately $3.09 billion in cash from Walmart. Completely ignoring the value of the shares themselves, and changing no ownership of those shares in any way...

Your argument seems to be: Owners of a valuable company should sell the company and give the money to the employees. Except who is going to buy the company if they too must then sell it and give the money to the employees?

The reason you made this argument is because you are an ignorant fuck that doesnt understand the difference between wealth and income.

...you ignorant fuck.

Uhh, have you been paying attention to oil prices and the reasons for the decline?

Commodities are not magically insulated from the law of supply and demand.

Investors don't care about 20% revenue growth y-o-y if EPS has tanked.
GOOG Earnings Per Share:
5.04(3/31/2014)
4.97(3/31/2013)
8.75(3/31/2012)
http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/g...

Not sure what is meant by 'dire', but warming is in line with expectations. Here is a quote from the IPCC TAR in 2001 - a projection that has not changed in recent reports: "anthropogenic warming is likely to lie in the range 0.1 to 0.2C/decade over the next few decades under the IS92a scenario" That is exactly what we have seen.

Regarding fuel supplies, Saudi Arabia plans to pump everything they can while people are still interested in oil. They do not believe they will run out:

"Thirty years from now there will be a huge amount of oil - and no buyers. Oil will be left in the ground. The Stone Age came to an end, not because we had a lack of stones, and the oil age will come to an end not because we have a lack of oil."

"in a world where a producer sees the end of its market on the horizon, then every barrel sold at a profit is more valuable than a barrel that will never be sold. Current Saudi oil minister Ali al-Naimi had this to say about production cuts in late December: "it is not in the interest of OPEC to cut their production whatever the price is," adding that even if prices fell to $20 "it is irrelevant." Implied, if not explicitly stated, is that Saudi Arabia wants its oil out of the ground, regardless of how thin its profit margin per barrel becomes." - http://www.nasdaq.com/article/...

in a world where a producer sees the end of its market on the horizon, then every barrel sold at a profit is more valuable than a barrel that will never be sold. Current Saudi oil minister Ali al-Naimi had this to say about production cuts in late December: "it is not in the interest of OPEC to cut their production whatever the price is," adding that even if prices fell to $20 "it is irrelevant." Implied, if not explicitly stated, is that Saudi Arabia wants its oil out of the ground, regardless of how thin its profit margin per barrel becomes. - http://www.nasdaq.com/article/...

In 2000, Sheikh Yamani, former oil minister of Saudi Arabia, gave an interview in which he said:

"Thirty years from now there will be a huge amount of oil - and no buyers. Oil will be left in the ground. The Stone Age came to an end, not because we had a lack of stones, and the oil age will come to an end not because we have a lack of oil." - http://www.nasdaq.com/article/...

Free nasdaq.com mirror of this particular article.

A quick check shows that they pay dividends quarterly, but the dividend rate (compared to stock price) isn't particularly great... While their dividends have risen somewhat in recent history, their stock price hasn't even kept up with inflation. IBM is about the same rate, and AT&T is notably better.

The investors were apparently right. Microsoft's stock price has gone roughly nowhere in the last decade, mostly because they're one of the most boring companies to invest in. They don't pay high dividends, they don't produce must-have new technology, and there's nothing that distinguishes them (in a positive way) from any other investment vehicle. They're just Microsoft.

On the other hand, Amazon is currently trading at six times Microsoft's price, and has shown enormous growth. Even if they don't make a profit or pay dividends, they're still interesting to inventors because they're doing interesting things. It's helpful to remember that investing in a company is effectively adding your money to the pool for whatever the company's project is. That project might be (and usually is) simply "make more money", but changing the world is also a possible goal. Being unprofitable is still reasonable for an investment, as long as investors are still interested in the company. I'll worry when Amazon's price falters, and they start using profit as a means to keep their value up.

A quick check shows that they pay dividends quarterly, but the dividend rate (compared to stock price) isn't particularly great... While their dividends have risen somewhat in recent history, their stock price hasn't even kept up with inflation. IBM is about the same rate, and AT&T is notably better.

The investors were apparently right. Microsoft's stock price has gone roughly nowhere in the last decade, mostly because they're one of the most boring companies to invest in. They don't pay high dividends, they don't produce must-have new technology, and there's nothing that distinguishes them (in a positive way) from any other investment vehicle. They're just Microsoft.

On the other hand, Amazon is currently trading at six times Microsoft's price, and has shown enormous growth. Even if they don't make a profit or pay dividends, they're still interesting to inventors because they're doing interesting things. It's helpful to remember that investing in a company is effectively adding your money to the pool for whatever the company's project is. That project might be (and usually is) simply "make more money", but changing the world is also a possible goal. Being unprofitable is still reasonable for an investment, as long as investors are still interested in the company. I'll worry when Amazon's price falters, and they start using profit as a means to keep their value up.

A quick check shows that they pay dividends quarterly, but the dividend rate (compared to stock price) isn't particularly great... While their dividends have risen somewhat in recent history, their stock price hasn't even kept up with inflation. IBM is about the same rate, and AT&T is notably better.

The investors were apparently right. Microsoft's stock price has gone roughly nowhere in the last decade, mostly because they're one of the most boring companies to invest in. They don't pay high dividends, they don't produce must-have new technology, and there's nothing that distinguishes them (in a positive way) from any other investment vehicle. They're just Microsoft.

On the other hand, Amazon is currently trading at six times Microsoft's price, and has shown enormous growth. Even if they don't make a profit or pay dividends, they're still interesting to inventors because they're doing interesting things. It's helpful to remember that investing in a company is effectively adding your money to the pool for whatever the company's project is. That project might be (and usually is) simply "make more money", but changing the world is also a possible goal. Being unprofitable is still reasonable for an investment, as long as investors are still interested in the company. I'll worry when Amazon's price falters, and they start using profit as a means to keep their value up.

A quick check shows that they pay dividends quarterly, but the dividend rate (compared to stock price) isn't particularly great... While their dividends have risen somewhat in recent history, their stock price hasn't even kept up with inflation. IBM is about the same rate, and AT&T is notably better.

The investors were apparently right. Microsoft's stock price has gone roughly nowhere in the last decade, mostly because they're one of the most boring companies to invest in. They don't pay high dividends, they don't produce must-have new technology, and there's nothing that distinguishes them (in a positive way) from any other investment vehicle. They're just Microsoft.

On the other hand, Amazon is currently trading at six times Microsoft's price, and has shown enormous growth. Even if they don't make a profit or pay dividends, they're still interesting to inventors because they're doing interesting things. It's helpful to remember that investing in a company is effectively adding your money to the pool for whatever the company's project is. That project might be (and usually is) simply "make more money", but changing the world is also a possible goal. Being unprofitable is still reasonable for an investment, as long as investors are still interested in the company. I'll worry when Amazon's price falters, and they start using profit as a means to keep their value up.

I tried that. I don't think you have.

Maybe you should clear out some cookies... I also tried pasting the WSJ article title into Google News after clearing browser cookies, and it worked nicely. Here are two of the links it came up with: first, the WSJ article in full, even though I'm not a subscriber, and second, a NASDAQ verbatim copy of it.

http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/c...

Institutional is not insider.

I suspect that the okay-ness of this fact depends on whether you are a disinterested observer (in which case your points are valid and likely account for many silent users, along with some amount of abandoned accounts, squatters, etc.) or whether you are somebody at Twitter, who would probably prefer to keep their (laughable) early post-IPO value of something north of 30 billion dollars, rather than have further bad news after announcing in Febuary of this year that you'd lost half a billion dollars in the last year, and that your >P/E ratio is kind of tepid.

For a site that requires sign-up to do all but the most crippled reading/following (do they do public RSS, such that you could 'follow' without an account? Barely matters since the public mostly doesn't and their design makes just-sign-up-with-us easier for most non-geeks than getting RSS up and running, especially across devices), 56% participation is actually higher than I'd expect, and certainly far from shockingly low. It's just that any pretense of being worth more than the scrap value of their office furniture is largely based on optimistic subscriber numbers, so I suspect that they are Not Happy about somebody talking about it. If some analyst comes out with "Percentage of twitter accounts that are actually bots" tomorrow, I imagine they'd be less happy still.

(Link heavy...) I think you got the wrong end of the stick, there.

Some studies have been done that show a minimum 30% penetration is possible for *any* region (and this one stopped their modeling at 30%, so its likely higher)...
http://www.renewableenergyworl...

An earlier study from Europe (no link at moment) put the figure around 40%.

Another US study comes in around 45%...
http://arstechnica.com/science...

UK study comes in at >90%...
http://www.gizmag.com/uk-natio...

German study comes in at 100%...
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...
More on this...
http://www.renewablesinternati...

Some of these show cost savings from adding renewables, another one showed costs rising about 10-15%.

Iowa already got over 25% of power from renewables in 2013; not sure about the mix but I don't recall hydro being a big player there. The state has set a 40% target for 2015!

As for diverse power generation, that is a good rule of thumb, however the non-renewable generators cannot continue to operate in the long-term and nuclear in particular is even worse than variable renewables as the latter has a large correlation with demand curves. Anyone scanning the field for the past few years, however, is getting the idea that a diversity of storage will be at least as important. And there are a LOT of different options. The state of the art in this field has moved completely beyond the 1990s consensus that your post is predicated on.

Hydropower operating permits are up: http://grist.org/news/america-...

In Germany, they have closed a deal with Norway which has vast hydropower resources.

Batteries are considered the least economic storage solution, but I suggest you google "flow batteries". Here are some examples other storage types:

Zynth batteries
http://www.eosenergystorage.co...

Battery EV storage pilot in US
http://www.latimes.com/busines...

Ice bears (cold storage for hot nights)
http://www.renewgridmag.com/e1...

Undersea pumped hydro (you read that right)
http://cleantechnica.com/2013/...

Power-to-gas
http://www.nasdaq.com/press-re...

Molten salt
http://spectrum.ieee.org/energ...

Maybe when you move up from 1st tier help desk? WTF does HI-Tech worker really mean?

Probably someone who works at a company listed as a High-Tech Stock, asshole.

Way to make an ass of yourself you condescending prick.

They just split the company yet again, and the electronics test/measurement operations (the descendant of the original HP business) got rebranded as "Keysight Technologies":

http://www.nasdaq.com/article/...

A company called "Hewlett-Packard" still exists, but they sell printers and PCs. Nothing to do with the company that Bill and Dave started in the Palo Alto garage....

Well, it does save a lot of money. No more beta testers, let the paying customers do it for you. :) Plenty of them will do free advertising for you, even if you charge them a premium to be "early adopters". Hell, Google Glass is $1,500 for a $200 toy.

Car executive says that his car catching fire is no big deal.

Where do you get "car executive"?

Have you seen what Tesla stock has been doing lately?
http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/tsla/stock-chart

A year ago, the stock was at $30. Today, it's close to $200. I bet there are more than a few owners of AAPL who wish they'd sold their Apple shares and bought Tesla last September.

Average volume is like 20million shares. There are a whole lot of people buying Tesla stock who are not "car executives". Although I bet there are a bunch of actual "car executive" who would love to have their company's stock price perform like that.

The NASDAQ today had it's 3rd significant pricing problem in the past few weeks.

http://www.nasdaq.com/article/options-exchanges-halt-trading-20130916-00868

These guys seriously need to improve their reliability.

correction - OPRA is an Options Industry Utility run by New York Stock Exchange (SIAC) not NASDAQ.

The NASDAQ today had it's 3rd significant pricing problem in the past few weeks.

http://www.nasdaq.com/article/options-exchanges-halt-trading-20130916-00868

These guys seriously need to improve their reliability.

There is no access barrier to real time quotes.

http://www.nasdaq.com/quotes/real-time.aspx

Cinedigm is a separate company, listed on Nasdaq. They sold their cinema distribution business to Technicolor and now do some production work for them. However, not being in the movie business, I don't have a great understanding of what this company does exactly.

Umm, wait a sec:

1) Apple has paid dividends before - even when Jobs was quite alive.

2) You're looking at the wrong time scale. OSX and the iPod came out in 2001. MacBook Air The iPhone was launched in 2007, and the MacBook Air in 2008. The iPad showed up in 2010. On that kind of scale, Apple could wait until 2015 and it would still keep to its innovation calendar just fine.

Not quite on the same scale and completely lost in the news of this explosion there was a fire at Exxon in Beaumont with 12 people injured. Not a good day for Texas industry.

Instead of re-inventing the wheel, use the same mechanism that stock markets use: if the price moves too much in a short period of time, a circuit breaker cuts in and suspends trading. It both stops the market getting skewed and signals that there's a problem.

The link I referenced has the full list. The point is Valve could sell out at any time and the new owner might not be as nice. At least they are a private company so there isn't any danger of a hostile takeover.

GLU Mobile is having a bad 4thQ and this stinks to me of a plot to extort money off of their affiliates.

Saint Google is now taking a page out of Microsoft's playbook.

Even just playing the NASDAQ composite over that time period would have netted them a solid 6% APY.

What? The total returns of the NASDAQ composite for the last 5 years was 12.75%. And not risky? During the most of the last 5 years the total returns over the previous 5 years was negative. This is not what a steady 6% annual return looks like.

My understanding is that there's quite a bit of profit in cancer treatment.

But a good example of what we're all (angry/concerned) about though, is Pfizer. Viagra, Lipitor, etc. were coming to a close on their various forms of protection.

So, facing trouble (a predicted drop of 68% of revenue), now they're being sued for trying to stall generic versions of lipitor from reaching the market, for 20 months after the patent expired, while arranging huge procurement (and enforcement) deals with purchasers to make sure they bought up lots of lipitor at high prices.

You can see why they'd do something shitty like that. They made $11 billion in 2010 and $9.58 billion in 2011 on Lipitor alone, when generics should have finally killed that cash cow.

That's a burden on people who need medication, and people who pay for healthcare, measured at some considerable percentage of $9.58 billion a year.

http://www.nasdaq.com/article/pfizer-accused-of-illegally-delaying-generic-lipitor-20120706-00356

Apparently Apple as of last week started giving substantial raises, so maybe she's in for some good news.

Apple Retail Employees Getting Sizeable Raises
raising the wages of its retail store employees by as much as a quarter of their wages following an internal review period earlier this year. Employees began learning of the raises in face-to-face meetings with managers last week, according to three Apple employees in various regions across the U.S. The raises, which are based on performance, will begin appearing in paychecks around the middle of July, two of these people said.

No! The functional completeness we have enjoyed until now has been the reason there are only that many half assed sw devs out there (thanks msft)!

Honestly I'm going in tomorrow and replace the last 10 or 20 remaining Fedora servers I have with gentoo or arch! That's it!

Whoever exercised due diligence did not buy, yet...
http://secfilings.nasdaq.com/filingFrameset.asp?FileName=0001193125-12-034517.txt&FilePath=%5C2012%5C02%5C01%5C&CoName=FACEBOOK+INC&FormType=S-1&RcvdDate=2%2F1%2F2012&pdf=

The hilarious part of this is that some of the investment firms are trying to get compensation from Nasdaq as well regarding lost profits from issues with the IPO - http://www.nasdaq.com/article/update-nasdaq-confronts-liability-on-traders-losses-in-facebook-ipo-20120521-00766

No, they didn't. If they had nailed it then they wouldn't be stepping in continually to keep the price from plummeting below $38. http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/fb/real-time

Check out the NASDAQ chart; http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/fb/real-time

You can see time they've stepped in. During that flat line you can see they've stepped in 5 or 6 times in just 20 minutes.

it never went past $43. wouldn't say it raised quite fast either, it kind of burped and then plummeted, then the underwriters stepped in to stabilize the price (twice). it's actually doing very poorly; you can watch all the excitement at; http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/fb/real-time

It needs to close at around $43 or $44 for the IPO to not be considered a failure.

Or you could be one of those lucky folk who bought Groupon shares ($18 at IPO, $10 and falling now).
http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/grpn/interactive-chart?timeframe=1y&charttype=line

There's no magic formula for IPOs and share offerings. Something can seem like hot property at the IPO, and crash spectacularly months later. My bet is that Facebook is probably pretty much at its peak, with almost complete saturation in the western world, no foothold in non-western markets, and gradually being nibbled away at by competitors like Twitter. From the point of view of "by low sell high", I wouldn't be investing in them now. Indeed, why do you think the owners are selling now (which is what an IPO is)?

I'm obviously not a hotshot investor, so I could be wrong. But I'd have no sympathy for people who invest now if it all goes belly up; the warning signs are there.

The NASDAQ OMX equities exchanges currently participate in the National Market System Symbology Plan for the selection and use of 1-5 character root symbols, as governed by ISRA, the Intermarket Symbols Reservation Authority.

NASDAQ, NYSE, and other exchanges like to reserve 1 and 2 letter ticker symbols in order to attract big companies to list on their exchange.

F is for Ford
S is for Sprint-Nextel
T is for AT&T

If you poke around, you'll discover companies you've never heard of, but who are major players in their market

Google had a significant portion of the Chinese market before pulling out - over 35%. And even with the current situation where they have much less marketshare, they're profitable. So basically you're full of shit.

Google had been against censorship all along, but decided to try and change China from the inside. Eventually, they discovered that it wasn't possible, so they stuck up for their principles and took their ball and went home. It's rare that you see a company put principle ahead of profit, and they should be commended for it.

If they are so against censorship then why is it only china they did this in while actively working with european and other asian countries to censor content? google has NEVER been against censorship, they are against government restricting there profit margin.

Google had a significant portion of the Chinese market before pulling out - over 35%. And even with the current situation where they have much less marketshare, they're profitable. So basically you're full of shit.

Google had been against censorship all along, but decided to try and change China from the inside. Eventually, they discovered that it wasn't possible, so they stuck up for their principles and took their ball and went home. It's rare that you see a company put principle ahead of profit, and they should be commended for it.

Rambus is or was pretty evil.

Then they sued everyone and if it were not for AMD Rambus would be the next monopoly in ram. AMD still used Sdram which many of us preferred over the high latency and $$$ rambus. They lost and thank god.

And the share market punished them today. Like really punished. Opening Stock price $18.04. Closing stock price $7.11. That's a 60% drop, and when you consider that the company (was) worth in the billions, that is a massive massive drop for a single day.

it already dropped 5% to a low of $350 in after-hours trading, then steadied at ~$357.

how they are doing!

http://www.nasdaq.com/aspx/nasdaqlastsale.aspx?symbol=BAC&selected=BAC

revenue ( 1 billion ) => profit => worth (>8 billion)