Officially, the Great Recession may be coming to an end, but it will leave in its wake historically high unemployment and a host of other serious economic problems. How will policy-makers promote a robust, employment-led recovery that will lay the foundation for strong, long-term growth?  Meeting this challenge requires both the will to continue investing in families hard hit by the recession despite growing budget deficits and the skill in crafting the right mix of policies to ensure that this recovery - unlike the last one - will bring significant numbers of new jobs and rising[More...]

Many investors, including myself, feel that the market is due for a correction. Some predict with the increased national debt, weaker dollar and a Congress unwilling to grasp both, even worse things may occur that will effect our standard of living now and, especially, in the future. One sector that may withstand a negative outlook are food processors. I used a computer screen to isolate those with anticipated growth of 10-25% next year. All appear stable and quite a few are international in scope. I must admit to having several obscure companies grace my computer screen. I did investigate all of them to a certain degree and without exception they look quite acceptable for investment consideration. You may decide to explore the companies on this roster for further study and, perhaps, inclusion within the defensive elements of your portfolio. I am. Lifeway Foods (LWAY) $13.77/ $231m market cap <br[More...]

This is the 1st Quarter 2009 edition of our ongoing hedge fund portfolio tracking series. Before reading this update, make sure you check out the Hedge Fund 13F filings series preface. Next up, we have Tremblant Capital Group. Tremblant is a $3 billion hedge fund based in New York and is run by Bret Barakett, who is a former portfolio manager at Moore Capital Management (the hedge fund run by the great Louis Bacon, whom we also track). If the last name of 'Barakett' sounds familiar, its because his brother, Timothy Barakett, manages fellow hedge fund Atticus Capital, whose portfolio we recently covered. Taken from their site, Tremblant Capital Group's objective is "to achieve superior risk adjust returns[More...]

Let me preface this piece by saying I stole this specific instrument from Jeffrey Saut, who mentioned it in his weekly missive. Long time readers will know I've mentioned this market has become all about asset allocation, and sectors - I noticed this late in 2007 when we were hiding out in commodities while many other sectors were imploding but other than a few periods when "everything" is going down (or up) it appears a lot of individual stock selection is going out the window and "sectors" are more important. Some themes are broad like "China" or "commodities" (which in many ways are now the same theme), where others are narrower such as "casual dining restaurants". I don't know if its the dominance of program trading or the growing popularity of ETFs but this seems to be a secular change in the[More...]

Larger restaurant corporations are losing out, but that’s actually a major win for the less expensive fast food chains as we’ve learned over the past few weeks. That’s no big surprise since a $7 dinner at Panera (Nasdaq: PNRA) or a $5 meal at McDonalds (NYSE: MCD) sounds infinitely more affordable than that $15 plus tip you’d have to spend at TGI Fridays. Likewise, eating at home has become a much more popular option as well, as evidenced by Kraft Foods Inc.’s (NYSE: KFT) first quarter earnings report. Despite difficulties last year when[More...]