Stock Investing

What better indication of a company’s health than an increase in dividend. And if lots of companies raise their dividend across various sectors, it is a positive sign for the economy. If you own a high yield stock for the long term for its income, and the stock increases its dividend, then you really don’t have to care about the day to day or week to week fluctuations in the stock price.

So what companies are providing these pleasant surprises to their shareholders? Target (TGT) bumped up its dividend by 20%, an increase of 5 cents to 30 cents a share per quarter. Target sports a yield of 2.6% and trades at 10.4 times forward earnings.

Caterpillar (CAT) boosted its quarterly cash dividend by two cents to forty-six cents per share. Full Post…

I wrote in the Weekly Recap Report mailed to subscribers on Sunday:

“You may be wondering why so many Wall Street analysts say the market’s next target is 1430. Those analysts, as do I, look back across to the other side of the canyon of the Financial Crisis Crash and see the market ricochet off that level several times in 2007-08 early on its way to the bottom. That 1430 zone was critical, first as a level of support and then as a level of resistance (click on images to enlarge):

It may look like the market was bouncing around 1430 for twelve months but it had actually already begun trending downwards.

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Usually announcements of secondary offerings can derail a stock at least in the short term, but yesterday shares of Tesla Motors (TSLA) broke out of a large cup with handle base with heavy volume after the company announced a follow on offering of 5.3 million shares to fund the development of its Model X crossover vehicle. This announcement in and of itself would not have lead to a breakout. Full Post…

I don’t know what’s happening to the market or how long it will go on but there is a weird transition happening. Others had talked about for a number of days so I had to see for myself and, lo and behold, it turns out to be true.

Scroll through the charts of the S&P 500 stocks for yourselves, as I did, and you’ll find it hitting you right in the face. The thing that’s happening is that there seem to be only three group of stocks recently moving ahead while the rest of the market seems to have hit a stone wall and have fallen back. You can look at a long-term stock chart and, before looking at the stocks symbol can correctly guess the industry group about an 70% of the time. There’s such a divergence between the groups and such a similarity between the stocks within a group.

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01-Jul-11 10:05 ET Dow +59.11 at 12490.78, Nasdaq +12.80 at 2789.77, S&P +5.30 at 1328.26

Stocks have made a strong push higher following a few pieces of data.

The final Consumer Sentiment Survey for June from the University of Michigan came in at 71.5, which is down slightly from the 71.8 that was posted in the preliminary report. The consensus among economists polled by had called for the reading to remain unchanged.

The ISM Manufacturing Index for June was also just released. It came in at 55.3, which is far better than the 51.1 that had been expected, on average, among economists polled by . The reading also represented a strong improvement over the 53.5 that was posted in the prior month.

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