CVS Health (CVS) will raise its annual dividend by 10% to $2.20 from $2.00 effective with the dividend payout scheduled for February 1. The company has also authorized a $10 billion share buyback program. The company also raised guidance for the full 2021 year to revenue of at least $290.3 billion and earnings of at least $8.00 a share.
I’m starting up my videos on JubakAM.com again–this time using YouTube as a platform. My seventy-eighth YouTube video “Look Out for Earnings Season” went up today.
Executives at Pfizer (PFE), which, remember, makes a Corona-19 vaccine–said yesterday, December 8, that the new Omicron Variant could increase the likelihood that people will need a fourth coronavirus vaccine dose earlier than expected.
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.)
With the VIX “fear index” falling back closer to “normal” levels–it dropped to 21.89 yesterday from 31.12 on December 1–it sure feels like the extreme volatility of the end of November and early December is on the ebb. The move to yesterday’s 21.89 close from December 1 was was a surge of 30% in the CBOE S&P 500 Volatility Index in a week. This move away from panic follows on a jump in the “fear index” in the week from November 24 to December 1 of 67% in the opposite direction. I’d be surprised if we don’t see another surge in volatility in the rest of December or in January with what promises to be a crazy earnings season, but even if volatility holds at something like today’s level–slightly elevated from the historical averages but in the rough ballpark–don’t forget that volatility has a long tail. Volatility, in fact, creates volatility. And not least of all in individual stocks.
It’s been a while but I haven’t forgotten. Back on October 5 I named Intuit (INTU) my eighth pick in my Special Report: 10 Greatest “Savings Account Stocks. Which meant that I owned readers two more picks. Today’s pick of West Pharmaceutical Services (WST) is pick No.9. One more to go. (As with picks No. 7 MasterCard and No. 8 Intuit, I’m suggesting that you hold off on buying West Pharmaceutical until we see a bigger dip or what I now anticipate as the end of the current extreme volatility sometime around March 2022.)
Here we go again. It’s not that we really have any more information about the Omicron Variant–we certainly don’t know what its effects will be on global economic acuity–but just as fears that the Covid-19 variant would send the world back into lockdown crushed stocks last week, this morning, December 7, a belief that Omicron won’t be all that bad has taken root and stocks are soaring in morning action.
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
I’m starting up my videos on JubakAM.com again–this time using YouTube as a platform. My seventy-sixth YouTube video “Quick Pick Veeva Systems” went up today.
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.
Today, December 2, the Federal Trade Commission sued to block Nvidia’s (NVDA) $40 billion acquisition of ARM. “The FTC is suing to block the largest semiconductor chip merger in history to prevent a chip conglomerate from stifling the innovation pipeline for next-generation technologies,” Holly Vedova, director of the commission’s Bureau of Competition, said in the statement.
I’m starting up my videos on JubakAM.com again–this time using YouTube as a platform. My seventy-fifth YouTube video “4 Picks for the Omicron Wave” went up today.
