TOP 100 TRANSPORTATION AND LOGISTICS SITES
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| Truck Tonnage Reflects Slowness of Recovery Truck tonnage for September reflects the slow recovery in the real economy. The ATA reports: The American Trucking Associations’ advance seasonally adjusted (SA) For-Hire Truck Tonnage Index decreased 0.2 percent in October, following a 0.3 percent contraction in September. The latest decline lowered the SA index to 103.6 (2000=100) from the revised 103.8 in September. The not seasonally adjusted index, which represents the change in tonnage actually hauled by the fleets before any seasonal adjustment, equaled 109.6 in October, up 1.6 percent from September. Complete Story » seekingalpha.com |
Long Updates: Opnext, Gymboree and FreightCar America skepticllc submits: It’s been a good first few months for the recommendations I have posted, but the entire market has been in a sharp rally mode. Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good. A brief update on each of the long positions I have outlined is as follows:Opnext Inc. (OPXT): Up 24% since 2/4/10A big part of this gain has come in the past couple of trading days, seemingly in reaction to news about a successful test of their technology, coupled with a similar announcement by Cisco (CSCO). (I believe these were two different tests, but the timing of the announcements on the same day was puzzling.) Volume has been very large on the increase, leading me to believe that people are looking at this as a derivative play on Cisco’s new products. All good news, but I haven’t seen anything about how soon this translates into sales/profits, so I’d look for an exit around $3 when the gap to fair value is closer to the 25%.Complete Story » seekingalpha.com |
General Motors: Doing the TARP Shuffle Kid Dynamite submits: I wrote about GM's shenanigans where they claimed to have "paid back the taxpayers, in full, with interest, ahead of schedule" a few weeks ago. Then I saw the ad they were airing on TV - it's so brazenly wrong that it even made my wife gasp at the audacity. Take a look, and make sure you enjoy the multimedia extravaganza I've put together for you in this blog post (potentially NSFW language ahead): Whoa whoa, GM (MTLQQ.PK) - in the immortal words of The Wolf in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction: "Let's not start sucking each others d***s quite yet." I am writing about this again because the NY Times's Gretchen Morgenson wrote an article about it yesterday, with the tagline, "Fair Game: At GM, Repaying Taxpayers With Their Own Cash." Of course, that header immediately made me think of Teddy KGB in Rounders: "It's a f**king joke anyway, after all, I'm paying you with your money." Amazingly, GM's CEO, Ed Whitacre didn't clarify, "your money: I'm still up $45Billion from the last time I stick it in you." I was excited to see that Morgenson was trying to explain the "TARP money shuffle" to her readers, but I think she missed the absurd simplicity of these accounting shenanigans. I want to make sure everyone understand this, so I'll try to simplify. GM has a big pile of debts they can't pay back so: The US Treasury gives them a huge loan: $52 billion Now, GM has a) the same huge pile of debt it had before, along with b) a new pile of $52B in debt to the Treasury, and c) $52B in cash.... then: GM declares bankruptcy, which massively reduces 3a, as preexisting debtholders restructure the debt they hold. It also massively reduces 3b, as the Treasury restructures the debt they hold - taking equity instead. In fact, it reduced the Treasury debt to $6.7B, which GM then paid back - using the cash it had - WHICH IT GOT FROM THE TREASURY! Voila - the TARP shuffle. At least we can feel good that GM is spending money bragging about its "payback," while the American Taxpayer is still $45Billion in the hole on this transaction. Complete Story » seekingalpha.com |
Aircastle Limited Q2 2010 Earnings Call Transcript Aircastle Limited (AYR)Q2 2010 Earnings Call TranscriptAugust 10, 2010 10:00 am ETComplete Story » seekingalpha.com |
GM Has Not Learned Its Lesson JunoTrade submits: It may seem to some that GM has been born again. The recent IPO that snagged over $20 billion which will go towards paying back last year’s taxpayer bailout of $49.5 billion has helped. Without such a burst of economic activity, it could have taken as long as a decade to clear this debt burden from the new GM shoulders. For those investors who like to get in and get out again in a hurry, stock market trading for this company may feel good and look good, but what lurks beneath the surface? Where does the greatest potential for repeated failure lie? What does the long term look like? To support the contention that this is not the right time to buy stock in the new GM, it is necessary to step back and understand what went wrong with the old one. With 100 years of history and 54% of the country’s car market in 1954, how did it come to such an embarrassing demise in 2009? Certainly several key factors played a role in the failure of this one-time car manufacturing giant. Unfortunately, unless those painful lessons are learned, the future may hold more of the same and be financially dangerous for those who are considering purchasing stocks in GM once again.Complete Story » seekingalpha.com |