Does Bad PR Make For A Good Investing Opportunity? 

 

 There is really no question "if" there will be another public relations scandal that taints a publicly-traded company. The only questions really revolve around "when", "how bad" and whether the next bad PR event will create a buying opportunity for shareholders. Like most other kinds of turnaround investing, though, investing in the face of bad PR can be a high-risk/high-reward situation. Accordingly, it is a good idea for investors to do what they can to tilt the odds in their favor.

Assess the Situation Across Four MetricsWhen approaching a stock that looks cheap because the company has made a very public gaffe, there are a few key constituencies to keep in mind. Ultimately the reactions of these groups will go a long way toward separating the wounded-but-will-recover from the permanently maimed. Impact on Customers

Bank Advisor Blunders And How To Avoid Them 

 

 

Although customer-oriented advice is the undisputed objective, two-thirds of bank customers complain that they still do not get offered the kind of products or services that are really appropriate for them. Even when advisors have their hearts in the right place, concepts fail to be well implemented and goals are not achieved.

What Advisors Typically Do Wrong
The underlying rationale for certain concepts is often not even properly understood by the advisors/sellers themselves. The level of education and skill of advisors is highly variable, and some are simply unable to get a grip on what they sell.

Cheap Stocks Can Be Deceiving 

 

One of the unifying traits of investors is that almost everyone wants to find a "cheap" stock to buy. Sure, there are momentum investors and chartists who never pay attention to valuation or price, but the bulk of the investing public wants to feel like it is buying a bargain. What not all investors realize, though, is that not all kinds of "cheap" are equal. The how and why of a stock's cheapness can have major repercussions on portfolio performance.

The Unknown
Many "cheap" stocks are cheap simply because they are virtually unknown. Oftentimes, these are stocks with no analyst coverage. Without that support, nobody with a broad platform is out there to sing the praises of the company. Likewise (and contrary to what investors may believe and what institutional investors and their ad agencies will say), professionals do not necessarily spend their days looking for undiscovered gems and buried treasure.

Cuba commutes sentence of last death row inmate

 

 

 Cuba's Supreme Tribunal has commuted the sentence of the country's last death row inmate, a rights group has said.

Humberto Eladio Real, a 40-year-old Cuban American, was convicted of killing a man in 1994 during an attempted insurgency raid.
The Cuban Commission on Human Rights and National Reconciliation commuted his sentence to 30 years in prison.
Cuba has had an effective moratorium on carrying out death sentences for years.
Earlier this month, two other death row inmates also had their sentences commuted.
Ernesto Cruz Leon and Otto Rene Rodriguez Llerena, both from El Salvador, had been convicted over a bombing campaign of tourism sites in Cuba in the 1990s which killed one Italian and injured 11 other people.
They were sentenced to death by firing squad but their sentences were commuted to 30 years at a hearing on 7 December.
Cuba's last executions were in 2003, when three people convicted of attempting to hijack a boat to escape to the United States were killed by firing squad.
Two years ago, within a month of taking over the presidency from his brother Fidel, Raul Castro issued a decree lifting the death sentence for 30 prisoners.
In a groundbreaking deal brokered by the Roman Catholic church, Mr Castro has also agreed to free the 52 most prominent political prisoners on the island.
The majority are now with the families in Spain, but 11 are refusing to go into exile and have yet to be released, says the BBC's Michael Voss in Havana.

 

Cold manatees swim to warm power plant waters

 

 

 Manatees - large aquatic mammals sometimes called sea-cows - are fleeing the unseasonable cold in Gulf of Mexico for the warm waters of power plant discharge canals.

More than 300 manatees swam into the outflow of Tampa Electric's Big Bend Power Station in Florida on Tuesday.
Manatees cope poorly with cold conditions, which can affect their immune systems and lead to death.
'Cold stress' killed large numbers of the gentle sea creatures in 2010.
The waters of the Tampa Electric plant are "like a warm bathtub for them," Wendy Anastasiou, an environmental specialist who has been watching the mammals loll about there, told the Associated Press agency.
"They're not blubbery mammals. They're very lean," Ms Anastasiou said. "They need a warm place to go."
Another 50 of the animals also gathered in the warm waters of a power station in Broward County, Florida.
Manatees will sometimes move to colder temperatures to find sea grass - a staple of their diet - but many will go without food for days in order to stay in the warm canal.
Unusual weather patterns are wreaking havoc on Florida's manatee population, with recorded deaths from cold stress increasing rapidly in recent years.

 

Flood chaos forces mass evacuations in Australia

 

 North-eastern Australia's worst flooding in decades is continuing to cause chaos across the region.

Around 1,000 people in Queensland have been evacuated, including the entire population of the town of Theodore.
The government has declared Theodore and two other towns in the region to be disaster zones, and forecasters say the floods have not yet peaked.
The cost of the damage is expected to top AU$1bn (£650m), including massive losses of sunflower and cotton crops.
Army Black Hawk helicopters are being despatched to help evacuate the 300 residents of Theodore, where every building in the town apart from the police station has been flooded, local media report.
The town's river has risen more than 50cm (20 in) above its previous recorded high, Emergency Management Queensland spokesman Bruce O'Grady told Australia's ABC News.
"We're in unchartered territory in that area," he said. "The [weather] bureau is indicating it could go higher."
'No easing' Inland towns such as Chinchilla and Dalby are all under water; the nearby town of Warra, and the towns of Alpha and Jericho, west of Emerald, have also been declared disaster zones, with hundreds of homes flooded or at risk.
Media reports said Dalby was running low on drinking water supplies after its water treatment plant was damaged by the floods.

A further 200 homes were swamped in Bundaberg on the south-east coast and hundreds of roads in the region have been made impassable.
The state capital, Brisbane, has recorded its wettest December in more than 150 years. Cyclone Tasha, which hit Queensland on Saturday, also brought torrential rain to the state.
Long traffic queues have formed outside isolated towns and police are arresting people who need rescuing after driving into badly hit areas, says the BBC's Steve Marshall in Sydney.
Further south, in New South Wales, about 175 people who had spent the night in evacuation centres have returned home.
But 800 people in the towns of Urbenville and Bonalbo are expected to be cut off for another 24 hours.
While the rain is now easing, water is continuing to flow from sodden land across central and southern Queensland into already swollen rivers, adds our correspondent.
Australia's Emergency Services Minister Neil Roberts told ABC the worst was yet to come.
"Over the next 48 hours rain will be easing but the real impact in some communities won't be felt for a couple of days when floodwaters begin to recede," he said.
"Once the rain finishes there will still be significant flooding impacts over the next few days."

 

Earth project aims to 'simulate everything'

 

 

 

It could be one of the most ambitious computer projects ever conceived.

An international group of scientists are aiming to create a simulator that can replicate everything happening on Earth - from global weather patterns and the spread of diseases to international financial transactions or congestion on Milton Keynes' roads.
Nicknamed the Living Earth Simulator (LES), the project aims to advance the scientific understanding of what is taking place on the planet, encapsulating the human actions that shape societies and the environmental forces that define the physical world.
"Many problems we have today - including social and economic instabilities, wars, disease spreading - are related to human behaviour, but there is apparently a serious lack of understanding regarding how society and the economy work," says Dr Helbing, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, who chairs the FuturICT project which aims to create the simulator.
Knowledge collider Thanks to projects such as the Large Hadron Collider, the particle accelerator built by Cern, scientists know more about the early universe than they do about our own planet, claims Dr Helbing.
What is needed is a knowledge accelerator, to collide different branches of knowledge, he says.
"Revealing the hidden laws and processes underlying societies constitutes the most pressing scientific grand challenge of our century."
The result would be the LES. It would be able to predict the spread of infectious diseases, such as Swine Flu, identify methods for tackling climate change or even spot the inklings of an impending financial crisis, he says.

Is it possible to build a social science equivalent to the Large Hadron Collider?

But how would such colossal system work?
For a start it would need to be populated by data - lots of it - covering the entire gamut of activity on the planet, says Dr Helbing.
It would also be powered by an assembly of yet-to-be-built supercomputers capable of carrying out number-crunching on a mammoth scale.
Although the hardware has not yet been built, much of the data is already being generated, he says.
For example, the Planetary Skin project, led by US space agency Nasa, will see the creation of a vast sensor network collecting climate data from air, land, sea and space.
In addition, Dr Helbing and his team have already identified more than 70 online data sources they believe can be used including Wikipedia, Google Maps and the UK government's data repository Data.gov.uk.
Drowning in data Integrating such real-time data feeds with millions of other sources of data - from financial markets and medical records to social media - would ultimately power the simulator, says Dr Helbing.
The next step is create a framework to turn that morass of data in to models that accurately replicate what is taken place on Earth today.

Continue reading the main story

“Start Quote

We don't take any action on the information we have”

End Quote Pete Warden OpenHeatMaps

That will only be possible by bringing together social scientists and computer scientists and engineers to establish the rules that will define how the LES operates.

Such work cannot be left to traditional social science researchers, where typically years of work produces limited volumes of data, argues Dr Helbing.
Nor is it something that could have been achieved before - the technology needed to run the LES will only become available in the coming decade, he adds.
Human behaviour For example, while the LES will need to be able to assimilate vast oceans of data it will simultaneously have to understand what that data means.
That becomes possible as so-called semantic web technologies mature, says Dr Helbing.
Today, a database chock-full of air pollution data would look much the same to a computer as a database of global banking transactions - essentially just a lot of numbers.
But semantic web technology will encode a description of data alongside the data itself, enabling computers to understand the data in context.
What's more, our approach to aggregating data stresses the need to strip out any of that information that relates directly to an individual, says Dr Helbing.

The Living Earth Simulator aims to predict how diseases spread

That will enable the LES to incorporate vast amounts of data relating to human activity, without compromising people's privacy, he argues.
Once an approach to carrying out large-scale social and economic data is agreed upon, it will be necessary to build supercomputer centres needed to crunch that data and produce the simulation of the Earth, says Dr Helbing.
Generating the computational power to deal with the amount of data needed to populate the LES represents a significant challenge, but it's far from being a showstopper.
If you look at the data-processing capacity of Google, it's clear that the LES won't be held back by processing capacity, says Pete Warden, founder of the OpenHeatMap project and a specialist on data analysis.
While Google is somewhat secretive about the amount of data it can process, in May 2010 it was believed to use in the region of 39,000 servers to process an exabyte of data per month - that's enough data to fill 2 billion CDs every month.
Reality mining If you accept that only a fraction of the "several hundred exabytes of data being produced worldwide every year… would be useful for a world simulation, the bottleneck won't be the processing capacity," says Mr Warden.
"Getting access to the data will be much more of a challenge, as will figuring out something useful to do with it," he adds.
Simply having lots of data isn't enough to build a credible simulation of the planet, argues Warden. "Economics and sociology have consistently failed to produce theories with strong predictive powers over the last century, despite lots of data gathering. I'm sceptical that larger data sets will mark a big change," he says.
"It's not that we don't know enough about a lot of the problems the world faces, from climate change to extreme poverty, it's that we don't take any action on the information we do have," he argues.
Regardless of the challenges the project faces, the greater danger is not attempting to use the computer tools we have now - and will have in future - to improve our understanding of global socio-economic trends, says Dr Helbing.
"Over the past years, it has for example become obvious that we need better indicators than the gross national product to judge societal development and well-being," he argues.
At it's heart, the LES is about working towards better methods to measure the state of society, he says, which would account for health, education and environmental issues. "And last but not least, happiness."

 

Gbagbo defiant as African leaders leave Ivory Coast 

 

 

 

West African leaders have ended their mission to Ivory Coast, having failed to persuade incumbent President Laurent Gbagbo to stand down.

They had hoped Mr Gbagbo would agree to cede power to Allasane Ouattara, widely considered to be the true winner of November's elections.
But Mr Gbagbo has refused, despite the leaders' threat of military action.
The dispute has led to widespread unrest in Ivory Coast, with thousands fleeing and scores of people killed.
The presidents of Benin, Sierra Leone and Cape Verde had travelled to the main city, Abidjan, as representatives of the Ecowas West African regional grouping.
The visit was being seen as a final chance to urge Mr Gbagbo to peacefully cede to Mr Ouattara - who is currently holed up in a hotel in the city protected by around 800 UN peacekeepers.
Few details of the separate talks with the two rivals have emerged, but President Boni Yayi of Benin told reporters: "Everything went well."
Cape Verde President Pedro Pires said the mission should not be judged in terms of success or failure.
"What we know is that we have done valid work here, not more than that," he said.
The West African presidents have left Ivory Coast and will now report back to Ecowas chairman Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan, who, they said, will negotiate a date for their return to Abidjan.
But instead of being persuaded to step down, Mr Gbagbo appears to be reinforcing his position.
One of his advisers told the BBC Mr Gbagbo was still the democratically elected president and that the Ecowas intervention was part of an "international plot" against him.

 

South Korea calls for new six-party talks with North

 

 

 

South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak has called for new six-party talks with North Korea.

Mr Lee said there was no choice but to try to dismantle North Korea's nuclear programme through diplomacy.
His comments follow a year of high tension, including exchanges of fire between North and South.
The talks format involves the two Koreas, China, Russia, Japan and the US, and had offered rewards to the North for ending its nuclear programme.
South Korea, the United States and Japan had previously said six-party talks could not resume until the North showed serious intent to change.
"(We) have no choice but to resolve the problem of dismantling North Korea's nuclear programme diplomatically through the six-party talks," said Mr Lee.
He was speaking after receiving the annual report from his foreign ministry.
Mr Lee said time was short for the international community to make progress on ending the North's nuclear threat because North Korea has set 2012 as its deadline to become a "great, powerful and prosperous" nation.
Tense times The comments appear to mark a shift away from the hard-line he had taken after North Korea was accused of torpedoing a South Korean warship, the Cheonan, on 26 March.

South Korea has carried out a number of military exercises recently

That incident left 46 South Korean sailors dead.
On 23 November, North Korea shelled the South Korean island of Yeonbyeong, killing four South Koreans, including civilians.
North Korea and its ally China, meanwhile, expressed anger at huge military drills mounted by the South with its main ally the United States.
South Korean reports say that North Korea has also dramatically stepped up its military drills in the past year.
Western allies of South Korea were angered by revelations this year about the existence of another nuclear enrichment plant in North Korea.
The North has again defended this, saying it was for the production of civilian power sources only and would not have been necessary if the US had kept to earlier promises to supply such facilities.
The six-party negotiations led to the closure of a plutonium-producing reactor in 2007, but collapsed in April 2009 amid mutual recriminations, after which the North set off further nuclear tests.
Mr Lee Myung-bak also told his nation earlier this week that it must unite in the face of military aggression from the North.

 

Call of Duty: Black Ops reaches $1billion sales mark #callofduty #blackops #games #ps3 #xbox

Call of Duty: Black Ops reaches $1billion sales mark.

 

Call of Duty: Black Ops has broken the $1 billion (£647 million) sales barrier, figures show.

Sales results released by publisher Activision Blizzard suggest it took just six weeks to do it.
In doing so it joins an elite group of entertainment releases to reach the billion dollar mark.
Others include Michael Jackson's Thriller album and James Cameron's 1997 hit film Titantic.
Activision CEO Bobby Kotick said: "Only Call of Duty and Avatar have ever achieved the billion dollar revenue milestone this quickly".
Fans of 2010's biggest video game have reported connectivity problems in recent weeks though.
Players of the PS3 and PC versions complained about being booted from games, freezing and connection error messages.
Developer Treyarch released two patches to fix the problem.
'Unprecedented' Activision's Eric Hirshberg said: "Even more remarkable than the number of units sold is the number of hours people are playing the game together online."

AIG signs $4.3bn private-sector loan agreements #finance #stock #business #AIG #US #Market # Trends

AIG signs $4.3bn private-sector loan agreements.

 

Troubled US insurance giant American International Group (AIG) has signed $4.3bn private-sector loan agreements.

It is a further step towards weaning itself off US government support.
Markets saw the loans as further evidence AIG can stand on its own two feet again, sending its share price up more than 9% - the day's biggest gainer on the New York Stock Exchange.
The company was one of the largest victims of the 2008 financial crisis, requiring a rescue totalling $182bn.
'Vote of confidence' The US Treasury still owns the majority of the insurer, and its stake is planned to rise to over 92%.