Today's Trading Ideas

Markets

Fourth-quarter profits at the world’s largest soft-drink maker, Coca-Cola Co (NYSE: KO), jumped 55% on rising volume in markets such as China and India. Lower costs also played a critical part in giving a boost to KO’s profits. The Atlanta-based company said its net income for the quarter rose to $...
It has been a good day on Wall Street with the Dow Jones Industrial Average appreciating nearly 200 points during the first two and a half hours of trading. Leading the way are the TickerSpy's Bill Collector Stocks, which have moved 7.4% higher, Airline Stocks, up 4.6%, and TickerSpy's Copper...
Crown Castle International (NYSE: CCI), the owner and operator of communications towers, is seeing some unusual options trade today and that activity looks bearish with purchase of 5,000 July 30 puts. There was no corresponding long trade in the stock to indicate the puts are being used as...
Developers Diversified Realty (NYSE: DDR), the Ohio-based real estate investment trust, has raised the amount of a share offering the company announced on Monday. Developers Diversified will now sell 37.3 million shares at $8.16 per share after previously saying it would sell 36 million shares. The...
Analysts at Citigroup, Inc. (NYSE: C) have released a report reviewing the first-quarter of FY10 at Alberto-Culver Company (NYSE: ACV). The company outlined the components of the $384 million acquisition cost of Simple Business in the first-quarter. The company reported free cash flow of $23...
Analysts Joseph D. Foresi and Jeffrey Rossetti at Janney Capital Markets have released a report reviewing the fourth-quarter results at Cognizant Technology Solutions Corporation (NASDAQ: CTSH). The company has reported strong results for the fourth-quarter. The company reported revenue of $902.7...
The board of Noble Corp. (NYSE: NE) has approved a return of capital to investors at twice the previous level, according to Reuters. This is in line with other players in the oilfields services business who wish to return anticipated cash flow to shareholders, now that the industry has stabilized...
Biotech giant Amgen (Nasdaq: AMGN) said its osteoporosis drug candidate denosumab outperformed a rival drug in delaying and reducing bone fracture in men with prostate cancer. Amgen's Prolia, the other name for denosumab, is viewed by analysts as the company's next blockbuster drug and a way to...

Topics

Last week, I had the opportunity to interview noted market participant and commentator, Doug Kass. Mr. Kass runs a hedge fund, Seabreeze Partners, and is a frequent guest on CNBC. Below is the full transcript of our interview. Q: What is your opinion on 2009 Wall Street bonus levels and the...
The drop in unemployment is just another shell game the government is playing with the American public. The 9.7% unemployment rate just means that there are less people collecting unemployment benefits. I would say conservatively the real jobless rate is more than double. With companies...
In the second part of my interview with top ranked analyst, Ronnie Moas, of Standpoint Research, we talked about some specific stock picks as well as his view on the markets in 2010 and beyond. In Part I of our feature on Standpoint, we covered Ronnie’s performance track record and quantitative...
T. Boone Pickens, oil tycoon and author of the green energy plan aptly named “The Pickens Plan”, stated earlier today that “the oil crisis is not over”. Mr. Pickens, chairman of the hedge fund BP Capital is spearheading a movement to wean the US off of foreign oil by promoting and investing in...
The sad reality of the unemployment rate in the US. After attending a tax preparers course for six weeks, two days a week, 3 hours a night and then taking a four hour online test. What do yo get? A part-time job offer preparing taxes for a little bit above minimum wages working at one of the top...
Recently, Benzinga.com had the opportunity to interview David Whitmore, who is the President of online broker SogoTrade. Previously, Whitmore held positions at TD Ameritrade (NASDAQ: AMTD) and Datek. SogoTrade is a subsidiary of Genesis Securities. He told Benzinga that SogoTrade’s percentage...
Chase Carey, Chief Operating Officer of News Corporation (Nasdaq: NWS) (Nasdaq: NWSA), told analysts during a conference call on Tuesday that the television advertising market is improving. He said things were improving for all of News Corporation's television businesses, although the economic...
With the arrest of three Nigerian nationals, the CBI has busted an international racket of multi-million dollar counterfeit MoneyGram money orders, used in the United States. The three arrested racketeers Adenowo Adekunle Azeez, Dosunmu Oluwatosin Abimbola and a woman Sanni Animat Olajumoke...

Forex

Developed by Donald Lambert, this method measures the relationship between a currency pair’s price, its moving average (MA) and the average’s normal deviations (D). It helps determine whether a pair has been overbought (overvalued) or oversold (undervalued). In the forex market, the CCI helps...
The indicators of the stochastic non-trending indicator get activated in three ways: • Stochastic Oscillator Crossovers: The Stochastic Oscillator generates a buy signal when it falls below 20% and then rises above it. It activates a sell transaction signal when it rises above 80% and then falls...
The weekly Commitment of Traders from the IMM currency futures were reported just before the weekend. There are several noteworthy developments. First, as of last Tuesday, the net short speculative position was a record at 43.7k contracts. The subsequent price action and open interest warns that...
The PowerShares DB US Dollar Index Bullish Fund (NYSE: UUP), along with the U.S. Dollar Index (UDX), both rallied sharply on Friday....perhaps a little too well, in fact. The approximate 0.4% move higher from each one carried both the ETF as well as the index to levels where downside reversals are...
The dollar rose against the major currencies of the world as soon as unemployment levels decreased by a small extent. Last month, as many as 20,000 jobs were lost, indicating a drop in construction employment and government and local hiring rates in the economy. Due to this, factory work week and...
The dollar rose today after a favorable jobs report was released for the month of January. As of 11:35 am EST, the dollar was trading up against the euro, pound, and yen. Against the euro, the dollar advanced 0.4% to $1.3670; against the pound, the dollar moved up 0.7% to $1.5642; and against the...
I am seeing a trade this morning that may very well signal an intermediate term bottom in the S&P 500. This trade comes in the PowerShares DB U.S. Dollar Index ETF (NYSE: UUP), where 103,000 Jan 2011 $24 calls were sold on the bid for $1.03. The volume of this trade exactly matches the open...
The US Non-Farm Payrolls has just been posted registering a drop of 20k compared to an expected gain of 15k. Despite the additional job losses, the US Unemployment figure dropped to 9.7% from 10% during January as a possible result of previous month’s adjustments. During the night, increased risk...

Media

Jim told viewers of his Mad Money show that semiconductor stocks are back in reckoning after being trapped for a decade by the prevailing business cycles. He believes that analysts have failed to notice that both cyclical and secular growth trends are now turning in favor of the semis. After going...
In his “Lightening Round,” Jim Cramer said that Nike (NYSE: NKE) is extremely cheap and should be bought now. NKE fell 0.65% to close at $61.30 yesterday. Jim believes that SPDR Gold Trust (NYSE: GLD) is a better investment than Silver Standard Resources (NASDAQ: SSRI) as he is unsure of the future...
Big retail chains are now experimenting with smaller formats. According to CNBC, Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT) has opened four Marketside stores in Phoenix. Marketside stores are smaller than regular Wal-Mart stores. Similarly, Big Lots (NYSE: BIG) has also opened four smaller stores. However, these big...
Biotechnology stocks have performed well so far this year. Mark Schoebebaum, managing director and senior research analyst at Deutsche Bank (NYSE: DB), shared his views about the sector with CNBC. According to Schoebebaum, the sector performed extremely well during the tough times in 2008. However...
CNBC Fast Money's Pete Najarian is thinking about Medivation, Inc. (NASDAQ: MDVN), a biotech company that is working on a new drug in a partnership with Pfizer (NYSE: PFE). He said that MDVN has a drug that is in the third phase of research and its results are expected in March. The drug is called...
Tim Seymour said on CNBC's Fast Money that he would sell Baidu.com (NASDAQ: BIDU) ahead of earnings. Baidu.com (BIDU) fell 1.24% today and closed at $443.25. Guy Adami believes Diamond Foods, Inc. (NASDAQ: DMND) is a buy, and Gary Kaminsky wants to short Lululemon Athletica inc. (NASDAQ: LULU)....
CNBC Mad Money's Jim Cramer said in an interview with Erin Burnett that Polo Ralph Lauren's (NYSE: RL) earnings conference call last week was bad. He added that this quarter won't be good for Ralph Lauren (RL). Cramer also said that he believes that the worst is behind us for this stock and that...
Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) stock has reacted badly to the news of the change in the pricing model of its bookstore. According to Barron’s, concerns over the impact of the change in the pricing model have been overblown. Even in the unlikely scenario of all the publishers switching to the agency...

Tech

One trader is drawing a line in the sand for web services company, AOL (NYSE: AOL). This morning the March $22 puts were sold 2,700 times for $0.50; this action was well above open interest on the strike. The Feb $23 strike put is also seeing volume of 1,400 contracts, in line with open interest....
Flash memory maker, SanDisk (NASDAQ: SNDK), is seeing a large volume of call trading this morning across many strikes. The Feb and March 25, 26, and 27 strikes calls have each traded over 3,300 times, nearly all purchases; the July 27 calls were also purchased 1,000 times. The vast majority of this...
According to this source, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) is expected to launch a new broad social product, which is designed to integrate at least two existing Google products. The company is expected to launch the new product today. The product is expected to make it faster and easier for Gmail users to...
SAP AG (NYSE: SAP), the European Software giant and Oracle Corporation (Nasdaq: ORCL) rival, Chairman and co-founder Hasso Plattner will take on a greater management role after the resignation of CEO Leo Apotheker. Apotheker resigned after the SAP AG board refused to renew his contract, which was...
Rajiv Goel, a former Intel Capital director, pleaded guilty on Monday to the charge that he had received money from friend and Galleon Group hedge fund founder Raj Rajaratnam. "Although we lived very different lives, we kept in close contact and I received money from him for personal financial...
Shares of video game producer Electronic Arts Inc. (Nasdaq: ERTS) rose over 2% as financial results from the fiscal 3rd quarter were anticipated. According to a poll of analysts by Thomson Reuters, earnings are expected to be 31 cents a share, a fall of 45% from the same period a year earlier. The...
Network and cyber security is a huge issue faced by big and small organizations today, in the world dominated by varied use of information technology in businesses. Recently, Tickle Industries LLC had its proprietary database of luxury products stolen. The reason why the data got stolen so easily...
Stock and debt markets around the world have been on shaky ground the past three weeks and some traders believe that the worst may not be over. On Friday, though we did close positive after being down significantly, one trader made a large bet in the PowerShares QQQ Trust (NASDAQ: QQQQ). This ETF,...