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Company name ABB Ltd (ADR)
Stock ticker ABB
Live stock price [stckqut]ABB[/stckqut]
P/E compared to competitors Fair

MANAGEMENT EXECUTION

Employee productivity Fair
Sales growth Poor
EPS growth Fair
P/E growth Fair
EBIT growth Fair

ANALYSIS

Confident Investor Rating Poor
Target stock price (TWCA growth scenario) $23.57
Target stock price (averages with growth) $33.67
Target stock price (averages with no growth) $33.2
Target stock price (manual assumptions) $22.69

The following company description is from Google Finance: http://www.google.com/finance?q=abb

ABB Ltd (ABB) is engaged in power and automation technologies committed to improving performance and lowering the environmental impact for utility and industry customers. The Company provides a broad range of products, systems, solutions and services that are designed to power grid reliability boost industrial productivity and enhance energy efficiency. The Company’s power businesses focus on power transmission, distribution and power-plant automation, and support electric, gas and water utilities, as well as industrial and commercial customers. Effective September 27, 2013, ABB Ltd acquired Baldor Electric India Pvt Ltd.

 

Confident Investor comments: At this price and at this time, I do not think that a Confident Investor can confidently invest in ABB Ltd (ADR).

If you would like to understand how to evaluate companies like I do on this site, please read my book, The Confident Investor.

For owners of my book, “The Confident Investor” I offer the following analysis (you must be logged in to this site as a book owner in order to see the following analysis). If you have registered and cannot see the balance of this article, make sure you are logged in and refresh your browser.
[s2If current_user_can(s2member_level1)]
In order to assist you in using the techniques of this book, the values that I used when calculating the Manual pricing above were:

Stock price at the time of the calculation: $24.87

Growth: 0.09

Current EPS (TTM): $1.25

P/E: 19

Future EPS Calc: $1.92

Future Stock Price Calc: $36.54

Target stock price: $22.68

I hope that this makes you a better investor. [/s2If]

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Institutional investors currently hold around $260 billion or 64.2% in Amazon [stckqut]AMZN[/stckqut] stock.

Look at its top three institutional owners. Vanguard Group Inc owns $21.44 billion in Amazon.com, Inc., which represents roughly 5.26% of the company’s market cap and approximately 8.25% of the institutional ownership. Similar statistics are true for the second largest owner, Price T Rowe Associates Inc, which owns 20,919,431 shares of the stock are valued at $17.84 billion. The third largest holder is Fmr Llc, which currently holds $16.49 billion worth of this stock and that ownership represents nearly 4.05% of its market capitalization.

At the end of 12/31/2016 reporting period, 984 institutional holders increased their position in Amazon.com by some 14,465,876 shares, 724 decreased positions by 23,425,019 and 164 held positions by 266,929,329. That puts total institutional holdings at 304,820,224 shares, according to SEC filings. The stock grabbed 219 new institutional investments totaling 3,835,622 shares while 136 institutional investors sold out their entire positions totaling 3,989,532 shares.

Multiple company employees have indulged in significant insider trading. Amazon.com, Inc. disclosed in a document filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that Director RYDER THOMAS O has sold 4,000 shares of Amazon.com, Inc. in trading session dated Mar. 01, 2017. These shares are worth $3,408,880 and were traded at $852.22 each. The SEC filing shows that ALBERG TOM A performed a sale of 590 shares. The Director disposed these shares by way of transaction on Feb. 21, 2017. The company’s shares were given away at $850 per share worth to an income of some $501,500 on account of ALBERG TOM A.Senior Vice President, Zapolsky David, sold 503 common shares of Amazon.com, Inc. in the open market. In a transaction dated Feb. 21, 2017, the shares were put up for sale at an average price of $850, raking in a sum of $427,550. After this sale, 2,523 common shares of AMZN are directly owned by the insider, with total stake valued at $2,153,179.In the transaction dated Feb. 15, 2017, the great number of shares disposed came courtesy the CEO Worldwide Consumer; WILKE JEFFREY A disposed a total of 4,890 shares at an average price of $840.06, amounting to approximately $4,107,893. The insider now directly owns 70,653 shares worth $60,296,683.

Source: Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN): A Detailed Look at its Institutional Ownership | Post Analyst

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Fund manager Geoffrey Abbott is extremely committed. Or maybe he needs to be committed.

Every day for the past seven weeks, Mr. Abbott has read an average of 39 letters that CEOs write to shareholders in their companies’ annual reports. His goal is to peruse the annual report from each of the 3,000 largest companies in the U.S. This past week, Mr. Abbott, who runs a small New York investment partnership called GCA Capital, plowed through the I’s and moved into the J’s. That puts him him on track to finish with Zumiez, Zynerba Pharmaceuticals and Zynga by the end of May, when Mr. Abbott will turn 30.

Thus, in a financial world driven largely by mathematical formulas and computers trading thousands of times a second, a young investor is searching for investments in the most old-fashioned way possible: by reading.

Warren Buffett doesn’t think Mr. Abbott is crazy. The chairman of Berkshire Hathaway himself spent much of the early 1950s reading every single entry in the thousands of pages of Moody’s manuals, the corporate encyclopedia of that era. He still spends most of his time reading — including the letters to shareholders in companies’ annual reports.

Not many investors seem willing to do that sort of digging anymore. Timothy Loughran, a finance professor at the University of Notre Dame who studies corporate disclosure, has analyzed computer records for the Securities and Exchange Commission’s filings website. He says only 29 people a day download the average annual report when it comes out. Even General Electric’s annual report was downloaded from GE’s website only 800 times in 2013, according to the company.

Source: It’s Time for Investors to Re-Learn the Lost Art of Reading – MoneyBeat – WSJ

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Holiday shopping isn’t what it used to be.

A National Retail Federation survey on Sunday found that more people shopped online than in stores during the Thanksgiving and Black Friday weekend, a sign of how quickly and deeply American shopping habits have changed.

This year, crowds at malls were thinner and stores were calmer over the Black Friday weekend. But online shopping, especially on mobile phones, surged as more retailers offered the same promotions online, often before items became available in stores and shoppers relished the joy of grabbing a deal while lounging at home.

Consumers spent an estimated $4.45 billion online Thursday and Friday, with Black Friday sales rising 14% from a year ago, according to Adobe Systems Inc., [stckqut]ADBE[/stckqut] which tracks purchases across 4,500 U.S. sites. It estimated that more than half of Black Friday shopping came from mobile devices. At Wal-Mart Stores Inc. [stckqut]WMT[/stckqut] about half of online orders since Thanksgiving have been placed on mobile devices, almost double the amount last year, according to the retail chain.

Source: Online Shopping Tops Stores on Black Friday Weekend

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Company name Saba Software, Inc.
Stock ticker SABA
Live stock price [stckqut]SABA[/stckqut]
Confident Investor Rating Poor

The following company description is from Google Finance: http://www.google.com/finance?q=saba

Saba Software, Inc. (Saba) is a provider of learning and talent management solutions providing a set of People Cloud Applications that include enterprise learning, talent management, testing and assessment and collaboration solutions delivered through the Saba People Cloud. The Saba People Cloud consists of a range of integrated People Cloud Applications, service-oriented architecture, a multi-tenant people cloud infrastructure, and a people cloud community of human capital experts, partners, practitioners and thought leaders. The Saba People Cloud enables organizations to transform the way they develop, engage and inspire their people network of employees, partners and customers by providing solutions that help clients to mobilize their people network, cultivate a development culture, accelerate innovation and creativity and leverage a unified, flexible, multi-tenant cloud. On March 19, 2012, the Company acquired HumanConcepts, organizational modeling and visualization provider.

Confident Investor comments: At this price and at this time, I do not think that a Confident Investor can confidently invest in this stock. It is not possible to confidently invest in a company that is not currently profitable.

If you would like to understand how to evaluate companies like I do on this site, please read my book, The Confident Investor.