Archive for May, 2008

  • The Strange BBBY Rally
    , May 1st, 2008 at 12:47 pm

    Ever since Bed Bath & Beyond (BBBY) reported its poor quarter a few weeks ago, the stock has rallied. The stock is now up about 20% from its low.
    We often look to clear reasons to explain stock price movements. It’s disquieting to think that sometimes there simply aren’t any. Of course, I never thought BBBY should have been that cheap to begin with.

  • Setting the Bar High
    , May 1st, 2008 at 12:43 pm

    It’s got to be rough for a company that earns $10.9 billion in a quarter, and the results are called disappointing.

  • De Beers Finds Shipwreck, Treasure From Columbus Era
    , May 1st, 2008 at 10:34 am

    This is cool:

    De Beers, the world’s biggest undersea diamond miner, said its geologists in Namibia found the wreckage of an ancient sailing ship still laden with treasure, including six bronze cannons, thousands of Spanish and Portuguese gold coins and more than 50 elephant tusks.
    The wreckage was discovered in the area behind a sea wall used to push back the Atlantic Ocean in order to search for diamonds in Namibia’s Sperrgebiet or “Forbidden Zone.”
    “If the experts’ assessments are correct, the shipwreck could date back to the late 1400s or early 1500s, making it a discovery of global significance,” Namdeb Diamond Corp., a joint venture between De Beers and the Namibian government, said in an e-mailed statement from the capital, Windhoek, today.
    The site yielded a wealth of objects, including several tons of copper, more than 50 elephant tusks, pewter tableware, navigational instruments, weapons and the gold coins, which were minted in the late 1400s and early 1500s, according to the statement.

  • The S&P 500 and Earnings
    , May 1st, 2008 at 10:14 am

    Here’s a chart of the S&P 500 (black line, left scale) and its earnings (yellow line, right scale). I scaled this graph at a ratio of 16-to-1, so whenever the lines cross, the P/E ratio is exactly 16. As you can see, even as the market has risen and sold off, the market is basically following earnings pretty closely.
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