Happy Friday, Crowd:

We got mentioned in a nice article in Canada's National Post about Twitter and stock markets (hint: If you aren't sending in your quick picks to Piqqem via Twitter, here's a primer) We published many blog posts with insights from our Director of Research and your Piqqem Sentiments on some of the most popular financial blogs on the Web including SeekingAlpha.com, AOL's Bloggingstocks.com, and Kiplinger.com. We've also been tweeting regularly with coverage of changes in Piqqem's Wisdom lists each day (new rising stocks, falling stocks, other sentiment changes) so if you haven't started following us yet, please do -- we're putting interesting things out there.

We're about to roll out some enhancement to our maps and I'll continue to add more lists for you to pore over and vote on. We're getting great traffic in both from Google and directly, as well as from other Web referrals. Tell your friends and keep coming back for more Piqqem. And if you have specific feedback for us, please fire away. We're always listening.

Thanks and have a great weekend and please keep those picks coming!

Best,

Alex

Comment

Greetings Crowd:

One of the things that we've long wanted to do but were swamped with other things was start building more interesting lists to help you get different slices of the market. Several times each week we'll be posting a new list configuration. Eventually it is our goal to let you build your own lists and have more control over that process and that will come as we continue to develop the features for Piqqem.com Here's our latest list. Any feedback on types of lists you would like to see, please, send along. Appropriately, we grouped the top recipients of TARP funds (the likes of Bank of America, Citigroup, and JP Morgan, among others). Call it the Doomsday List as in, these folks may all be doomed (we hope not). Enjoy and please tell us what you think.

Comment

Hi, Crowd:

You may see this appearing in other places on the Internet as we are starting to write some articles based on the data we are pulling from you and combining it with other sources. Any feedback is much welcomed. Thanks!

Six Simple Reasons Why Betting Against Apple Now is a Mistake

The Apple doomsayers had a field day last week when independent research company NPD announced that sales of Mac computers were down by 6 percent in January in U.S. stores. Based on that decline, Apple's market share dropped from 13.7 percent to 16.4 percent. A second study, by forecasting company ChangeWave Alliance, also showed an incremental weakening of Apple sales, particularly in the desktop segment. We think these changes are borderline irrelevant. Apple continues to be the highest-rated stock in the Piqqem Sentiment Index and for good reason. Here's why last week's bad news and the subsequent price decline into the low $90s is actually pricing anomaly pending a rebound into the low $100s as the news shakes out.

1) January is sequentially a very weak month for PC sales in general - Face it, few people buy PCs right after Christmas and even fewer in this horrific economic environment. It's hard to imagine a worse datapoint touchstone upon which to base a long-term decline trend. And a good portion Apple's drop comes from its desktop segment. This makes perfect sense. Creative agencies and designers, deep in the deepest slump of their lifetimes, are cutting back as media spending craters. And consumers don't want to buy Apple desktops because the Mini and the iMac are both long-of-tooth with rumors of replacement models running hot and heavy. The upshot? This is the wrong time to do a comp.

2) MacWorld 2009 had very few exciting product announcements - Apple has tried to buck the January blues with killer product announcements at the MacWorld confab. This year, there simply were no major announcements. Sure, some nifty software enhancements, a moderately improved MacBook Pro but nothing to drive people to hit the buy button. So this January is probably even a weaker comp than past Januaries due to the lack of new product mojo.

3) Focusing primarily on Mac computer slowdown underplays importance of the iPhone - <a href="http://seekingalpha.com/article/82183-the-hidden-financial-impact-of-apple-s-iphone">Andy Zaky</a> have written about the massive cashflow that the deferred "subscription" based accounting Apple has elected to employ for iPhone sales will create over the next two to three years. Add to this the unbelievably rabid adoption of iPhone apps and the rapid transition to mobile computing as the most prevalent form of computing and it's clear that focusing most of your attention on the Mac computer lineup is akin to focusing most of your attention on sales of telegraph transmissions right after the telephone was rolled out.

4) The Coming Kindle Killer and Mac Netbooks -- This is a similar argument to the Boxee one above. I guarantee that in Apple's skunkworks there is a text reading product being readied for Market. The Kindle's rapid adoption for what is a somewhat clunky device and offering prices that are still very high for what people are buying clearly illustrates the market is ready for this type of device. Should Apple come in with a Kindle-killer at a decent price and with a strong offering from publishers channeled through iTunes, this could be something of a small-sized iPod effect. True, the iPod has never packed the profit punch of the computer line. And a digital reader would, likewise, not pack the same punch. But it would provide an unexpected incremental boost. After all, iPod sales alone in 2004 had rocketed to $1.25 billion a mere two years after launch. The Air laptops have been a moderate success addressing a premium market. But Apple could easily drop in a cheaper version of its Air to quickly capitalize on the rapid growth of Netbook sales. I'd look for an announcement on one or either of these products in June. 

5) Overstating the Importance of Steve Jobs -- When Palm came into CES with its new mobile OS and very cool touchscreen product, the geeks were wowed. A familiar name was largely behind that impressive product push -- Jon Rubinstein. Sound familiar? Yes, he was formerly the head of the hardware division at Apple. So what does this have to do with overstating the Cult of Steve? Palm designed a killer new product and got a huge marketing push on par with what Apple can deliver. It did this by rolling out a very nice product that was well finished and well thought out. A former Apple guy was a driving force behind it. And that's always been the case at Apple, too. Jobs has been the vision and the marketing muscle. But there are plenty of other people at Apple who are perfectly capable of putting together a Jobsian buzz effect.

6) The Balance Sheet -- Apple is sitting on $25.6 billion in cash, or roughly $28 cash per share. So subtracting out that cash, Apple's current share price would be roughly $63. Based on consensus analyst earnings estimates of $5.19 for the coming year (estimates that don't include the full impact of the deferred iPhone revenues), that give Apple an insanely low FP/E of 12. That's a heck of a bargain. Even should Apple revenue estimates fall, bumping minus-cash FP/E upwards, the multiple is so low that its hard to not jump in (just ask value players on CNBC Fast Money like the ever skeptical Jeff Mackey and Karen Finerman). Now, if Apple's downward trend picks up and NPD numbers start to get worse, then you might need to revisit. But at present, Apple has a nice shine to it regardless of what the Mac counting crowds say.

 
 

Comment

Greetings:

Here's another one of our periodic blog posts based on observations derived from user predictions at Piqqem. There are many fascinating nuggets of information tucked away in Piqqem's prediction stacks and we plan to highlight some of the most interesting among them.

The Golden Arches shine brightly for Piqqem users fresh behind the ears and well advanced in years. Piqqem users between the ages of 18 and 29 gave Mickey D's a big thumbs up, voting MacDonald's as their most highly rated equity. Their least popular stock was General Motors -- which gives you a hint at the difficulty GM is going to have coming back if young car buyers hate the brand. Similarly, Piqqem users over the age of 60 made MacDonald's their highest rated equity, while Yahoo was their lowest (go figure?).

Piqqem CEO Jett Winter and I were discussing how this really makes sense. Young people love MacDonald's because it open late, convenient, clean and increasingly comfortable for hanging out, thanks to new renovations and the Starbuck'- like coffee bars. Older folks like MacDonald's probably for the same reasons, except for the staying open late part. Both groups like it because it's cheap -- perhaps the key part since both groups spend less than people in the middle demographics.  Make's sense to me!

Comment

Our Twitter release got us posted on Wired's blog and SmartMobs. We hope that all of you readers have tried our our Twitter product and are going to be sending us a nice tweet stream very soon.

Comment

 

This chart reflects the latest rankings from Piqqem.com. The equities receiving the top rankings from Piqqem users include the following: Apple (AAPL), McDonald's (MCD), Activision Blizzard (ATVI), Chesapeake Energy Corp. (CHK), IBM (IBM), GameStop (GME), Forest Labs (FRX), Wal-Mart Stores (WMT), F5 Networks (FFIV) and Humana (HUM).

These rankings are forward leaning although they may reflect Piqqem user predictions made before the latest earnings periods. In most cases, the ratings appear to follow analyst consensus on various sectors and, in particular, on the Blue Chip names such as WalMart and McDonald's. The ratings diverge from analysts consensus on F5 Networks and Activision Blizzard. The predictions come from sentiments and charts input by Piqqem users combined with other elements of our proprietary algorithm. We will be updating this report monthly and possibly more regularly in the future.

Comment

We're really happy to roll this out. Please let us know your feedback. We're closely listening. We'll also put this information in the FAQ page in the next few days. Thanks for trying out our new Twitter tool.

 How to Make Piqqem Sentiment Predictions Via Twitter

1.  Go to your Piqqem account preferences and enter your Twitter user name

2.  You may vote for stocks at Piqqem by creating a tweet @piqqem with a ticker symbol designated by a $ or a # and a piqq rating (--, -, =, +, ++).

3. Any additional text is added to your Piqqem.com account as a “user take” (opinion).  A tweet that does NOT include @piqqem will be ignored.  Below are some examples of valid tweets:

4. Tweets @piqqem are counted as normal sentiment votes by Piqqem's price prediction algorithms.

5. You may view your own Piqqem tweets on your Profile page or directly from the Internet via /tweets.

Comment

We posted a number of quick-take research articles on the Web over the past week and will be continuing to do so. Some use Piqqem sentiment and some are just to get our name out there more broadly. We're posting regularly on SeekingAlpha and AOL's Bloggingstocks, two of the most popular stock market blogs on the Web. Also, look for us to do some guest posts on Mashable, the extremely popular blog about Web-based applications and technologies. And look for some big news out of Piqqem tomorrow late in the day. Here's some of our posts from the previous week.

Why the Street is Wrong About Abercrombie & Fitch - AOL Bloggingstocks

Retail Experience Draws Women to Apple? - TUAW.com

Amazon's Kindle is No iPod - SeekingAlpha

Two Valentine's Day Stocks -- SeekingAlpha

Comment

The annual sweetheart celebration is coming this weekend so we thought it a good time to revisit sentiment for some sweet stocks. The Hershey Company (HSY), one of the world's largest chocolate makers, is closing out some of its high-end lines but appears to be successfully pushing through price increases, a rarity in this market. The company just beat earnings consensus and upped guidance for the coming year. Apparently, chocoholics are going to buy sweets whatever the economic situation so Hershey appears to be a good defensive play, although forward valuations, at nearly 20 P/E are quite rich. Piqqem Sentiment on The Hershey Company is moderately bullish with a target share price of roughly $38.50. Make mine a dark, please.Another sweet stock is Coca-Cola (KO), the iconic softdrink maker that began rebounding in 2008. Coke shares bounced on February 12 after the company's sales slowed down less than analysts had forecast. Coke is also viewed as a defensive play but the company had been losing market share and mind share to Pepsico for a number of years before a recent Renaissance. Piqqem Sentiment on Coke is strongly bullish with a sentiment target share price of over $50. 

Comment

The video game segment is a particularly interesting one. It's undergoing a massive shift as single-player games fall out of favor to be replaced multi-player or sharing games or, alternatively, massively multiplayer online (MMO) games. Nintendo has been cleaning everyone's clocks with its simple yet highly addictive Wii games (SuperMario Karts is particularly addictve.) And Activision Blizzard, which owns and operates the wildly popular "World of Warcraft" MM franchise, has enjoyed considerable buzz. At the same time, GameStop has been doing  very well and bucking the recession primarily due to sales of used games through the stores. This is a much higher margin item than the new games. The sales of used games has greatly angered the video game publishers like Electronic Arts and TakeTwo Interactive. The Piqqem Sentiment appears to be closely tracking these trends, as Piqqem users have given a single-arrow up rating to Activision and to Game Stop but a single arrow down to the publishing giant Electronic Arts, which has no strong play in the MMO market.

Comment