Chinese Banks and Greek Polls Look to Lift the Market

I hope everyone had a nice long weekend. The stock market looks to open higher today. The good news is that banks in China appear ready to boost lending. Also, the polls in Greece suggest that the conservative parties will do well.

Also, Joe Banks ($JOSB) said that it will report its first-quarter earnings on Thursday. This will be an interesting report because three months ago, the company reported inline earnings and said that business is on the weak side for Q1.

The first quarter of 2012 has started out more slowly than we had planned with declines in both comparable store sales and Direct Marketing sales for the first 8 weeks of the quarter. The declines are primarily due to weaker than expected traffic and also due to the warmer winter weather which is resulting in significantly lower sales of outerwear and cold weather merchandise. We are making marketing changes to address the sales trend. We believe that these changes will be effective and appealing to our customers; however we remain cautious about the outcome of the first quarter of 2012.

The shares dropped from $54.48 before the report to as low as $45.12 last week. Wall Street has trimmed its earnings estimate from 73 cents per share to 62 cents per share.

Posted by on May 29th, 2012 at 8:55 am


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