The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) is finally seeing greater evidence of strength from some of the country�� non-mining sectors, which could bode well for economic growth now that investment in the resource space is on the decline.
On Wednesday, March 26, RBA Governor Glenn Stevens delivered an upbeat speech in Hong Kong before the 17th Annual Credit Suisse Asian Investment Conference.
Following his remarks, the Australian dollar extend its recent rally and currently trades near USD$0.923, up about 6.3 percent from its three-year low in late January, near USD0.868. At this level, the aussie is down about 16.2 percent from this cycle�� high in mid-2011.
For 2014, Mr. Stevens predicts growth will be led by the developed world, a rebalancing of sorts after the many years in which the emerging markets drove the global economy.
As for Australia�� regional peers, the RBA chief sees growth continuing at a pace in line with the recent trend. He noted that China, which grew slightly faster than the central government�� official target last year, could slow down somewhat during the first half of this year.
Best European Stocks To Watch Right Now: Retractable Technologies Inc. (RVP)
Retractable Technologies, Inc. designs, develops, manufactures, and markets safety syringes and other safety medical products for the healthcare industry in the United States and internationally. Its products include VanishPoint 0.5mL insulin syringes; 1mL tuberculin, insulin, and allergy antigen syringes; 0.5mL, 2mL, 3mL, 5mL, and 10mL syringes; small diameter tube adapters; blood collection tube holder; allergy trays; IV safety catheters; Patient Safe syringes; Patient Safe Luer Caps; and VanishPoint blood collection set, as well as autodisable syringes. The company sells its products to healthcare providers, such as acute care hospitals, alternate care facilities, doctors� offices, clinics, emergency centers, surgical centers, convalescent hospitals, veterans administration facilities, military organizations, public health facilities, and prisons. Retractable Technologies, Inc. distributes its products through a direct marketing network; and general line and specialty distributors, as well as through international distributors. The company was founded in 1994 and is headquartered in Little Elm, Texas.
Advisors' Opinion:- [By Holly LaFon]
Chip Skinner is a portfolio manager and principal of Royce & Associates, LLC, investment advisor to The Royce Funds. He serves as portfolio manager for Royce Value Plus Fund (RVP) and serves as an assistant portfolio manager for Royce Low-Priced Stock Fund (RLP). The thoughts expressed in this piece are solely those of the person speaking and may differ from those of other Royce investment professionals, or the firm as a whole. There can be no assurance with regard to future market movements.
Top 10 Asian Stocks To Watch Right Now: MicroStrategy Incorporated(MSTR)
MicroStrategy Incorporated provides enterprise software platforms for business intelligence (BI), and mobile and social intelligence applications worldwide. The company offers MicroStrategy 9, an integrated BI platform that enables businesses to make business decisions. The MicroStrategy 9 platform?s product components comprise Intelligence Server, a foundation for the BI platform; Report Services, a reporting engine delivering production and operational reports, managed metrics reports, and interactive dashboards; OLAP Services that allows Web and desktop users to manipulate Intelligent Cubes databases; Web, a Web interface providing query, reporting, and analysis; Distribution Services that offers automated report and dashboard distribution; Office, which enables Microsoft Office users to create, run, edit, and format MicroStrategy report; and Desktop that provide users access to data through analytical applications. The MicroStrategy 9 platform?s product components al so include Architect, whose data sources are modeled through an intuitive graphical user interface; SDK to integrate MicroStrategy 9 features and functionality into any application on multiple platforms; Integrity Manager to compare and verify reports? consistency; Command Manager that automates MicroStrategy administrative tasks; Enterprise Manager to provide prebuilt reports and dashboards; Object Manager that allows administrators to manage disparate and distributed environments; MultiSource Option allowing users to report, analyze, and monitor data; Transaction Services that provides write-back capabilities; and Clustering Option, a plug-and-play add-on to Intelligence Server. The company also offers technical support, consulting, education, and cloud-based solutions. It serves retail, communications, financial services, insurance, healthcare, manufacturing, technology, consumer goods, and public services industries. The company was founded in 1989 and is headquartered in Tysons Corner, Virginia.
Advisors' Opinion:- [By Evan Niu, CFA]
What: Shares of MicroStrategy (NASDAQ: MSTR ) have plunged today by as much as 13% after the company reported first-quarter earnings.
So what: Revenue in the first quarter added up to $130.2 million, a 6% decline from a year ago. That translated into a loss from continuing operations of $5.2 million, or $0.46 per share. Those figures looked poor relative to consensus estimates, which were calling for $152.4 million in sales and $0.35 per share in profit.
- [By Victor Selva]
The second place was occupied by MicroStrategy Incorporated (MSTR), a provider of business intelligence and mobile software with 5.5% of the total portfolio and worth $52.6 million. It reported significant earnings per share improvement in the most recent quarter compared to the same quarter a year ago, and the stock price outperformed the rise in the S&P 500.
- [By Tim Beyers and Erin Miller]
Importantly, the BI sector as a whole isn't seeing gains. MicroStrategy (NASDAQ: MSTR ) fell as much as Qlik gained on a 6% decline in revenues in the most recent quarter. Qlik, by contrast, reported a 22% rise in revenue and told analysts to expect another 20% or better bump in the quarter.
Top 10 Asian Stocks To Watch Right Now: Agenus Inc.(AGEN)
Agenus Inc., a biotechnology company, engages in developing and commercializing technologies to treat cancers and infectious diseases. It offers Oncophage vaccine for the treatment of adjuvant renal cell carcinoma. The company?s products under development include Prophage series of cancer vaccines, which has been tested in Phase III clinical trials for the treatment of renal cell carcinoma (RCC) and metastatic melanoma, as well as has been tested in Phase I and Phase II clinical trials in various indications; and under Phase II clinical trials in glioma, a type of brain cancer, and adjuvant renal cell carcinoma. The Prophage series of cancer vaccines include R-series candidates in RCC, M-series candidates in melanoma, and G-series candidates in glioma. Its product candidate portfolio includes QS-21 Stimulon adjuvant, which is in Phase III clinical trials for the treatment of non-small cell lung cancer, melanoma, malaria, and shingles, as well as in for the treatment of va rious infectious diseases and Alzheimer?s disease; and HerpV that completed Phase 1 clinical trial for the treatment of genital herpes. The company was formerly known as Antigenics Inc. and changed its name Agenus Inc. in January 2011 to reflect its existing product pipeline. Agenus Inc. was founded in 1994 and is headquartered in Lexington, Massachusetts.
Advisors' Opinion:- [By Lisa Levin]
Agenus (NASDAQ: AGEN) rose 22.99% to $3.37 after the company reported positive follow-on Phase 2 results for brain cancer vaccine.
Aeropostale (NYSE: ARO) shares jumped 18.23% to $10.18 after private equity firm Sycamore Partners bought a 7.96% stake in the company.
- [By Smith On Stocks]
I am initiating coverage of Agenus (AGEN) with a Buy. I have just published a basic report on my website, which goes into detail on the company's two core technology platforms: (1) the heat shock protein technology that is the basis of therapeutic and preventive vaccines for cancer and infectious disease, and (2) the QS-21 Stimulon adjuvant that is being used by Agenus and other vaccine developers to enhance the effectiveness of their vaccines. This report is a summary of that more detailed report.
- [By Monica Gerson]
© 2014 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.
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Top 10 Asian Stocks To Watch Right Now: Shutterfly Inc.(SFLY)
Shutterfly, Inc. provides an Internet-based social expression and personal publishing service that enables consumers to share, print, and preserve their digital photos through the medium of photography in the United States. It offers a range of personalized photo-based products and services for consumers to upload, edit, enhance, organize, find, share, create, print, and preserve their memories. The company produces and sells photo books, greeting and stationery cards, personalized calendars, and other photo-based merchandise, including calendars, mugs, canvas prints, mouse pads, magnets, and puzzles. It also offers photo prints consist of wallet and photocards. In addition, the company provides commercial print services. Shutterfly, Inc. was founded in 1999 and is headquartered in Redwood City, California.
Advisors' Opinion:- [By John Kell]
Shutterfly Inc.'s(SFLY) fourth-quarter earnings fell 18% as the e-commerce company recorded higher expenses. Shutterfly also said it expects to post a loss for the current year. Shares dropped 7.6% to $45.90 premarket.
- [By WWW.DAILYFINANCE.COM]
From a struggling department store chain delivering better than expected financial results to a popular photo-printing services provider botched a mass mailing, here's a rundown of the week's smartest moves and biggest blunders in the business world. Keurig Green Mountain (GMCR) -- Winner Coca-Cola (KO) is apparently a coffee addict. The world's leading beverage company turned heads earlier this year when it paid $1.25 billion for a 10 percent stake in Keurig Green Mountain. This week it announced that it's bumping its stake to 16 percent, paying a much higher price for the new shares. Keurig Green Mountain is the company behind the country's most popular single-serve coffee maker. In a few months it plans to enter the carbonated beverage market with Keurig Cold. Coca-Cola is on board to provide soft drink flavors for the machine, and now the company has a greater stake in seeing that Keurig Cold is successful. Shutterfly (SFLY) -- Loser "There's nothing more amazing than bringing a new life into the world," begins a promotion that Shutterfly mailed out this week. "As a new parent you're going to find more to love, more to give and more to share -- we're here to help you every step of the way." Shutterfly intended for the mailing to go out to customers who had recently ordered birth announcements, reminding them that matching thank you cards are now in order for the family and friends who provided gifts for the new baby. The problem here is that the marketing email went out to a far wider base of Shutterfly registered users. Twitter and Facebook were alive with folks joking or complaining about the mishap. It was an amusing blunder for most recipients, but it's easy to see how this kind of missive could hit hard to others. Netflix (NFLX) -- Winner We're apparently a nation of Netflix addicts. Online trend watcher Sandvine (SVC) reports that the streaming video service accounted for 34.2 percent of the North America's peak downstream Internet traffic durin
- [By John Udovich]
Bloomberg has reported that small cap digital photo services and solutions stock�Shutterfly, Inc (NASDAQ: SFLY) is in talks with investment bank Qatalyst Partners to find buyers for the company���meaning its worth taking a closer look at the stock which has no close publicly traded peers left albeit the stock does compete with Hewlett-Packard Company�� (NYSE: HPQ) Snapfish and services offered by retailers�like CVS Caremark Corporation (NYSE: CVS).
Top 10 Asian Stocks To Watch Right Now: Industrias Bachoco S.A. de C.V. (IBA)
Industrias Bachoco, S.A.B. de C.V., through its subsidiaries, operates as a poultry producer in Mexico. It engages in breeding, processing, and marketing of poultry products, such as chicken and table eggs; and balanced animal feed comprising swine and other products. The company also offers turkey and value-added beef and pork products. It sells its products to wholesalers, retailers, supermarkets, rosticer Advisors' Opinion:
- [By John Udovich]
Thanksgiving is around the corner�meaning investors might want to take a closer look at turkey stocks�like Hormel Foods Corporation (NYSE: HRL), Seaboard Corporation (NYSEMKT: SEB) and Industrias Bachoco, S.A.B. de C.V. (NYSE: IBA)���the last major�publicly traded turkey stocks available for investors. Moreover, the Wall Street Journal has pointed out that corn prices are the lowest in more than three years and fewer birds are in production as some producers cut back on their flocks this year due to weaker turkey commodity prices.�Feed prices, which make up about 70% of the cost of a turkey, had soared with the price of corn which hit the $8 a bushel level but a recent�bumper crop has sent corn prices plunging to about the $4 a bushel level.
- [By Seth Jayson]
Calling all cash flows
When you are trying to buy the market's best stocks, it's worth checking up on your companies' free cash flow once a quarter or so, to see whether it bears any relationship to the net income in the headlines. That's what we do with this series. Today, we're checking in on Industrias Bachoco (NYSE: IBA ) , whose recent revenue and earnings are plotted below.
Top 10 Asian Stocks To Watch Right Now: Marketo Inc (MKTO)
Marketo, Inc. (Marketo), incorporated on December 17, 2009, provides cloud-based marketing software platform that enables organizations to engage in modern relationship marketing. The Company�� software platform is designed to enable the execution, management and analytical measurement of marketing activities, helping organizations to acquire new customers. The Company�� platform includes marketing automation, social marketing, sales insight and revenue analytics. Its customer base includes 2,000 customers across a range of industries, including business services, consumer, financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, media, technology and telecommunications. The Company provides its solutions on a subscription basis. Effective December 19, 2013, Marketo Inc acquired Insightera Ltd.
The Company designs, builds and markets a suite of integrated applications to address the needs of modern marketing professionals. The Company�� customers use these applications individually and in combination to streamline and automate marketing processes; develop, retain and extend customer relationships, and measure the positive impact on revenue of marketing programs. Its platform and suite of applications is hosted and delivered over the Web using a cloud-based, or software as a service (SaaS) model, and is built using a multi-tenant architecture. The Company markets and sells its enterprise applications as: Marketo lead management, which includes the core Marketo platform, plus all of the marketing automation capabilities available on the platform; Marketo social marketing, which enables social media campaigns, such as referrals, sweepstakes, and other customer engagement campaigns, and also includes features to add social marketing extensions to traditional marketing campaigns; Marketo sales insight, which provides insights to salespeople about their customers and prospects, and Marketo revenue cycle analytics, which is a suite of analytic tools, analyzers, and ad hoc reporting capabilities taki! ng advantage of its time-series analytics engine.
The Company has built a suite of applications that run on its platform. The applications include marketing automation, social marketing, sales insight and revenue analytics. Marketing automation provides a set of capabilities for marketers to create, automate, and track personalized multi-channel marketing campaigns and relationship-marketing workflows. It includes functionality for marketers to finely segment their prospect and customer database based on collected demographic and behavioral data; generate custom Web pages without programming; send batch and individual personalized marketing messages over email, short message service (SMS) text, and other channels; streamline the entire process of running online (e.g., webinar) and offline (e.g., trade show) marketing events, and to execute multi-step lead nurturing and relationship-marketing campaigns that can run over days, weeks, or months.
Social marketing enables marketers to run social media marketing campaigns, as well as to an increase traditional marketing campaigns with a social marketing aspect in order to amplify marketing messages across social networks. Its solution lets marketers add intelligent social sharing buttons to existing Web content and videos; publish new Facebook pages with the touch of a button; build social engagement applications, such as polls, sweepstakes, and referral offers to engage their audience and promote social cross-posting, and increase existing customer and prospect information with social profiles and sharing behavior.
Sold on a per-seat basis, the Company offers sales insight application to customers utilizing Microsoft dynamics customer relationship management (CRM) or salesforce.com as their CRM system. Revenue Analytics provides a range of ways to help companies understand the correlation between marketing programs and revenue outcomes, and includes: a library of operational reports detailing e-mail and landing page per! formance,! Web activity, and lead performance; intuitive analyzers that show the influence of marketing on individual customer outcomes; analytics that compute and illustrate the impact, effectiveness and return on investment of marketing programs individually and in aggregate, and an ad-hoc report builder for completely customized reports and dashboards.
The Company competes with Act-On, Eloqua, Aprimo, HubSpot, SAS Institute, Unica, ExactTarget, Responsys, Silverpop, Oracle Corporation and SAP AG.
Advisors' Opinion:- [By gurujx]
Marketo Inc (MKTO): SVP & CFO Frederick Ball Sold 50,000 Shares
SVP & CFO of Marketo Inc (MKTO) Frederick Ball sold 50,000 shares on 09/18/2013 at an average price of $33.99.
- [By Jon C. Ogg]
Marketo Inc. (NASDAQ: MKTO) was reinstated as Outperform with a $38 price target (versus a $31.49 close) at Credit Suisse.
Nike Inc. (NYSE: NKE) was started as Neutral at UBS.
- [By David Zeiler]
8. Marketo Inc. (Nasdaq: MKTO): Marketo is a cloud-based marketing software platform, which puts it smack-dab in the heart of one of the hottest sectors in tech. MKTO went public May 17 with an offer price of $13 a share. It rose 64% on its first day, and currently trades at about $33.87, an increase of just over 160.54% from the offer price.
- [By Lee Jackson]
The Lazard trading desk said that active traders may want to look at software stocks that still had unusually high short interest. Those included Concur Technologies (NASDAQ: CNQR), Tangoe Inc. (NASDAQ: TNGO), Jive Software (NASDAQ: JIVE), Marketo Inc. (NASDAQ: MKTO), VeriSign Inc. (NASDAQ: VRSN) and VMware Inc. (NYSE: VMW). Stocks with high short interest can explode to the upside if the company gets back on track and short sellers are forced to cover.
Top 10 Asian Stocks To Watch Right Now: Descartes Systems Group Inc (DSGX)
The Descartes Systems Group Inc. (Descartes) is a global provider of federated network and global logistics technology solutions that help its customers make and receive shipments and manage related resources. The Company�� network-based solutions, which primarily consist of services and software, connect people to their trading partners and enable business document exchange (bookings, bills of lading and status messages); regulatory compliance and customs filing; route and resource planning, execution, monitoring and reporting; inventory and asset visibility; rate and transportation management, and warehouse operations. Its pricing model provides its customers solutions either on a perpetual license, subscription or transactional basis. In December 2013, the Company acquired Compudata and Impatex Freight Software Limited.
The Company�� focus is on serving transportation providers (air, ocean and truck modes), logistics service providers (including third-party logistics providers, freight forwarders and customs brokers) and distribution-intensive companies. To help deliver the resources in motion management solutions (RiMMS) solutions to customers, Descartes developed the Logistics Technology Platform. Descartes��Logistics Technology Platform is synthesis of network, applications and community. The Logistics Technology Platform fuses Descartes��Global Logistics Network (GLN), logistics networks covering multiple transportation modes, with an array of modular, interoperable Web and wireless logistics management applications.
The applications available over the Logistics Technology Platform that work in conjunction with the GLN, help transportation companies and logistics service providers (LSPs) control their shipment management process, comply with regulatory requirements, expedite cross-border shipments and connect and communicate with their trading partners. Applications are also available on the Logistics Technology Platform to help manufacturer, retailer, distribu! tor and mobile service provider (MRDM) enterprises. Its applications are designed to support global trade and compliance systems (GT&C), which encompasses the preparation and filing of the necessary electronic documentation relating to a shipment, such as cross-border customs documentation, freight waybills or manifests; supply chain execution (SCE), which entails the processes related to managing shipments from their point of origin to their point of destination, as well as the documents related to those shipments (booking data, orders, contracts and rates, shipment status, proof of delivery, invoices and payments), and mobile resource management applications (MRM), which involves tracking, information gathering, measuring, reporting, compliance filing, delegating and optimizing the use of mobile assets and people that are involved in the movement of goods.
The Logistics Technology Platform supports a community of over 35,000 trading partners sending over one billion messages annually in over 160 countries. Designed specifically for logistics processes and their users, the Logistics Technology Platform enables organizations to centrally manage information, deliver messages and transform data.Customers use its modular, software-as-a-service solutions to route, schedule, track and measure delivery resources; plan, allocate and execute shipments; rate, audit and pay transportation invoices; file customs and security documents for imports and exports.
Advisors' Opinion:- [By Rich Smith]
Waterloo, Ontario-based Descartes Systems Group (NASDAQ: DSGX ) has acquired KSD Software Norway AS, a company described as a "leading Scandinavia-based provider of electronic customs filing solutions for the European Union ('EU')."
- [By CRWE]
Descartes Systems Group (Nasdaq:DSGX), the global leader in uniting logistics-intensive businesses in commerce, reported that Salient Management Company, a leading provider of performance management solutions, has selected Descartes’ advanced geographic information system (GIS) platform for incorporation into Salient’s performance management solution.