As of the close in New York today Ford Motor (F) shares were up 11.67% after the company announced it would nearly double production capacity to meet demand for its upcoming F-150 Lightning electric pickup truck. The price of $24.31 is a 21-year high for Ford’s stock.
We’ve got just two more trading sessions left in 2021. And then it’s on to 2022. Which means you should have wrapped up–or making any last minute sells–to harvest tax losses from 2021 in the next day or so. Of course, being the tax-savvy investor that you are, you have postponed taking profits on big winners in 2021 until 2022. (I’ll have an update on January profit-taking in the week after New Years.)
Johnson Controls International (JCI) raised its quarterly dividend to 34 cents a share, a 26% increase, effective with the dividend payment payable on January 14, 2022. (The record date for owning the shares in order to collect the dividend is December 20, 2021.)
As I noted in my posts over the weekend, I think that along with all the general volatility and the rotation away from high moment and higher price-to-earnings ratio technology stocks, the last week or so saw a rotation into “safe” haven stocks such as utilities and Big Pharma. Which is one of the reason I’m adding Bristol-Myers stock to my Jubak Picks Portfolio as of December 7
But 2021 has been very, very good to the iPath B Bloomberg Coffee Total Return ETN (JO). A series of disruptions–weather in Brazil and Colombia, a shortage of shipping containers that curbed exports from Vietnam, a civil war in Ethiopia–sent coffee prices to a 10-year high on November 30. Despite the global Pandemic depressing demand from consumers who didn’t venture out of coffee shops during the worst of the virus outbreak. Now after a 73% gain for 2021 to date the question for investors after the is how much higher can coffee prices and this coffee ETF go?
The trend for the next year or two looks positive.
Analysts watching game revenue in Macao’s casinos are seeing just a bit of improvement after operators were walloped by Pandemic shutdowns, border closings with Hong Kong, and government restrictions aimed at high-rollers. JPMorgan has forecast that 2022 gross gaming revenue in Macao will rise to just above 50% of the pre-pandemic level seen in 2019 as a result of 70% recovery in mass market gaming and travel and a 24% recovery in VIP revenue. That’s a very slight improvement from JPMorgan’s previous outlook. Investment house Jefferies has also become incrementally more positive on the Macao outlook. Analyst David Katz says the Macao market could be close to bottoming with current local Covid-19 infections in China falling to single-digits and a partial China-Hong Kong border opening possible before year-end. My preferred stock to play Macao is MGM Resorts International
It’s tempting right now to say “To hell with diversification; let’s put everything into U.S. stocks. After all, they’re outperformed most asset classes for most of 2020 and for the year to date.” That’s exactly the kind of thinking, however, that gets an investor into trouble when an asset class is trading near a historic high. A time like this, like now, is exactly when you should be looking to make sure that you’ve got decent balance in your portfolio. And, to the degree you can, own stuff that will go up when other stuff goes down. Which is why I’m adding shares of the Van Eck Agribusiness ETF (MOO) to the Perfect 5 ETF Portfolio today
Today Microsoft (MSFT) closed up 2.08%. The NASDAQ 100 was ahead just 0.51% and the Standard & Poor’s 500 gained only 0.13%. The gains took Microsoft shares to a record intraday high of $297.35. Why the extra pop in Microsoft shares? Because today Microsoft raised the price of its Microsoft 365 productivity suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams, Outlook and Enterprise Mobility) by as much s 20%, effective March 1. The price increase is the first since the launch of Office 365 ten years ago.
I posted Friday, June 11, that investors looking for a theme to buy in an expensive market had turned to Cyber Security stocks. Makes sense, I noted, with ransomware attacks running at a fast pace and forecast pointing to even more attacks on corporate and government systems in the months (years?) ahead. I wrote that in this sector I already owned Palo Alto Networks in my Jubak Picks Portfolio where the stock is up 79% since I added this position on June 27, 2019, and in my 50 Stocks Portfolio where it is up 50% since I added this position on January 21, 2020, and in my new Millennial Portfolio where the position is up 0.94% since I added it on May 21, 2021. And that I would be adding another Cyber Security stock, CrowdStrike Holdings, to my Jubak Picks and Millennial portfolios on Monday, June 14
Oil prices have bounced back big time and with them the prices on oil stocks. I still think the long-term trend is against oil producers as efforts to combat global warming lead to lower consumption of fossil fuels. And I’d prefer not to own any oil and natural gas shares–even in as “progressive” a company as Equinor. I’m going to take advantage of the rally in oil prices to sell these shares out of my Jubak Picks Portfolio with a small 0.9% gain since I established that position in May 2012.
The chip shortage that has hurt technology companies such as Apple (AAPL) and hammered auto producers continues to pay dividends to Applied Materials (AMAT), the dominant manufacturer of equipment used to make semiconductors. Yesterday, May 20, after the market close in New York, Applied Materials reported fiscal second-quarter adjusted earnings of $1.63 a share against 89 cents a share in the second quarter of the last fiscal year. Revenue rose to $5.58 billion from $3.96 billion in the second quarter of fiscal 2020.
Owners of AT&T (T) have been willing to overlook the company’s lack of growth, its “amusing” strategic plan, and its wandering goals because, hey, the shares paid 6.45%. That’s a dividend to make up for a multitude of corporate sins when the 10-year Treasury is yielding just 1.65%. But today owners discovered that as part of its deal to spin off and combine its Warner media assets with Discovery into a new company WarnerMedia/Discovry (AT&T shareholders will own 7%) AT&T will “reset” its dividend to 40% of free cash flow.
