I’ve been beefing up our bullish plays on the Watch List.

If we’re going to get more bullish I thought it would be a good time to look for some bullish premises so we don’t feel totally silly paying 20-year high p/e’s for the S&P 500.  Obviously, our main hope is that the stocks we buy will grow into their earnings so the next month’s worth of reports will be key.  The bar for corporate earnings is still set at very easy to beat levels yet, like this limbo playing child, when they announce their beats of very low expectations we’re going to get all excited and tell them how great they are doing.

The problem is, these are not kids who we hope may grow up one day to be President or CEOs of major companies. these ARE CEOs of major companies and they are being paid top salaries for top performance and we, the stock purchasing public, are paying top dollar for what should be SPECTACULAR performance, not beating 75% off last year by a nickel! 

When I am being asked to buy IBM back at it’s all-time high or AMZN or BIDU or AM, PALM, NFLX, PCLN, URBN, UHS, CERN, CREE, GMCR, CY, SWM, TRLG, BKE, etc - then their performance better look like this:  

Nothing against those particular companies, any individual company can be exceptional and beat the market but are the companies we’re buying really doing exceptional things or are have we just developed such ridiculously low expectations that we have been psychologically conditioned (and Wall Street firms employ armies of behavioral psychologists for a reason) to treat these stocks and the CEOs who run them like our children.  If your child was the child in the above picture and I asked you for $20 to see here show - you might pay it.  If it’s not your child though, would you even consider making an afternoon of it?  No, of course not, you want to see the cool fire guy at the top of his game and that is what you should expect from companies trading at or near all-time highs - NO LESS!

I love President Obama but he was just given a Nobel Prize simply for not being President Bush.  On Sept 17th, PALM announced that it lost 10 cents a share, not losing the 25 cents expected and gave lowered guidance for Q3.  The non-adjusted loss for PALM was their 9th consecutive…

Here is a look at the top scorchers of the third quarter; a period where the S&P 500 gained 15% - it's best return since we were building the last stock market bubble in 2008. Who says history does not repeat itself?[More...]

The stock trading technique called 'Buying Dividends' is becoming more and more popular, especially with the recent increase in the stock market. This is the process of buying stocks before the ex dividend date and selling the stock shortly after the ex date at about the same price, yet still being entitled to the dividend. This technique generally works only in bull markets.

When you buy dividends, there are many stocks in many different sectors to choose from. In order to be entitled to the dividend, you have to buy the stock before the ex-dividend date, and you can't sell the stock until after the ex date. The actual dividend may not be paid for another few weeks. WallStreetNewsNetwork has compiled a free downloadable and sortable Excel list of the stocks going ex dividend during the next week. wsnn.com came up with many companies all with market caps over $500 million. Here are a couple examples showing the stock symbol, the ex-dividend date and the yield.

Actually there are eight going ex dividend this week on October 1 including:

American Greetings Corporation AM ex div date: 10/1/09 market cap: $590.5M yield: 3.1%

Kayne Anderson Energy Total Return Fund KYE ex div date: 10/1/09 market cap: $674.5M yield: 9.5%

Then next week, there are many more including:

Gentex Corporation GNTX ex div date: 10/5/09 market cap: $2.0B yield: 3.0%

Marsh & McLennan Companies, Inc. MMC ex div date: 10/7/09 market cap: $12.5B yield: 3.4%

The rest of the ex-dividend stocks can be found at wsnn.com. (If you have been to the website before, and the September link doesn't show up, you may have to empty your cache.) If you like dividend stocks, you should check out the high yield utility stocks and the Monthly Dividend Stocks at WallStreetNewsNetwork.com or WSNN.com. For more details on dividend definitions, check out definitions of dividend dates. Don't forget to reconfirm the ex-dividend date with the company before implementing this technique.

Author doesn't own any of the above.

By Stockerblog.com - Stockerblog - The St...

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