2013 earnings

Apple's first 2013 earnings to be closely watched The company's earnings on Wednesday are expected to set new sales records for iPhones, iPads, and maybe even Macs. But Wall Street is still concerned. Apple reports its first-quarter earnings this week, and the results could not be more closely watched for signs of the company's health and future. The story is well-known by now. Shares of Apple's stock have been on the decline, going from $702 in late September to a close at an even $500 last week. That's a 28.4 percent drop in just over four months. Positive results -- and a look ahead when Apple puts out its numbers Wednesday -- could turn that trend. Apple forecast $52 billion in revenue and earnings of $11.75 per share when it reported its previous quarterly results in October. Wall Street's expecting the company to top that at $54.69 billion and earnings per share of $13.41 based on a poll of 47 analysts done by Thomson First Call. Those estimates are pared down from the $13.87 per share analysts were expecting ahead of last quarter's forecast, a shortcoming that caused concerns that Apple's growth had stalled. During a conference call with analysts, Apple chalked it up to tighter margins in the creation of its newest products including the iPad Mini, which starts at $329 and is estimated to cost the company around $198 in parts and labor, according to IHS iSuppli. Making things a bit more complex is that Apple ended its calendar year with a bang, refreshing nearly its entire line of computers and putting out new versions of the iPhone, iPod, and iPad. That's expected to make this quarter -- which has historically been strong due to holiday sales -- a whopper. But it's also raised concerns about the company's performance during the rest of the year, given a long history of product launches that are staggered. By the numbers Product-wise, Apple's story remains focused on the iPhone, the company's mega profit driver. Analysts have long been concerned that the average sale price of the device, which has been one of the highest in the business, is set to fall dramatically as the smartphone market continues to mature. That issue has been compounded with the makeup of iPhones people are buying, with many customers choosing to buy last year's model or the one from the year before, which Apple sells at a lower price and profit margin. Wall Street expects Apple to announce iPhone sales somewhere between 43 million and 53 million. That's up from the 37.04 million iPhones it sold the same quarter the year before, and 26.9 million the previous quarter. In fact, it would be the most iPhones sold during any quarter since the product's release. This is the first quarter to include iPad mini sales. This is the first quarter to include iPad Mini sales. (Credit: Apple) For Apple's iPad, which the company refreshed in late October, Wall Street's expecting between 23 million and 25 million units. That, too, is up from 14 million in the previous quarter and 15.43 million in the same quarter last year. It would also top Apple's previous sales record of 17 million iPads from its June quarter last year. One area to watch on Wednesday is Macs. Why's that? Some analysts are anticipating a possible year-over-year decline in sales, despite product refreshes last year that would point to stronger numbers. That's not necessarily the case, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster said in a note to investors last week. "The December quarter of 2012 faces a difficult comparison from 2011 as the 2011 quarter had an additional week," Munster wrote. "As a result, we remain comfortable with our down 7 percent year over year estimate, which implies 4.8 million Macs." Some other estimates expect Apple to beat last year's 5.2 million, including Gabelli & Co., which believes Apple sold 5.3 million computers, which would be an all-time sales record. That kind of performance would be especially impressive given two things: One is that Apple's iMacs did not start shipping until the very tail end of November and late December for the larger model. The other is possible cannibalization by Apple's growing tablet lineup, which doubled down with the iPad Mini during the quarter. "We have learned over the years not to worry about cannibalization of our own product," Apple CEO Tim Cook said about just such a phenomenon during last quarter's earnings call with analysts. "It's much better for us to do that than for somebody else to do it." Apple will report just after the market closes on Wednesday, followed by a conference call with executives at 2 p.m. PT. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57564903-37/apples-first-2013-earnings-to-be-closely-watched/

fil

The European Space Agency released photos taken last year that show an ancient, now-dry riverbed. This has come as an unprecedented shock to the public, most of whom were unaware that Europe has a space agency. In addition, it’s also pretty cool that there was once a river on Mars. However, you may be asking yourself “Isn’t NASA the one covering the surface of Mars with adorable, dust-scooping, rock scanning robots? Why are they still futzing around with drills and spectroscopy if the ESA has already figured out where J’onn J’onnz went innertubing?” If you’re asking yourself this, welcome to the Internet! You’re obviously new here. There are some funny pictures of cats here, also nobody in Africa actually wants to give you free money. Or anywhere else, for that matter. At any rate, once you’ve spent a little time on the Internet, you’ll discover that NASA exists for only two purposes. First, to lie about going to other worlds. Second, to cover up the mind-bending things they found on the other worlds that apparently they went to after all. So it goes without saying that NASA has all sort of dope on Mars — all sort of Mars-dope — that they’re not sharing with the public. Remember a couple months ago when some scientist at NASA said there was some sort of shocking news about Mars that they were going to announce, and then his higher-ups said “No, no shocking news here. Nope.” Have you heard that that scientist died shortly thereafter in a “mysterious” plane crash? You probably will, that seems like the sort of thing someone would make up. However, this is your lucky day, fans of hypothetical, long-gone, extraterrestrial bodies of water! I happen to have a contact in NASA’s Department of Cover-Ups, Mars Division, Aquatic Artifacts division. He was willing to share information on the various top-secret discoveries that NASA has made on Mars, on the condition that I not write an article about it. Sucks to be you, contact! Here are three shocking pieces of evidence that Mars once had liquid water. 1. “The Rover Opportunity discovered a strange rock formatiElysium Onon that, after extensive analysis with chemical and spectrographic tools, turned out to be an empty soup packet. Scientists generally agree that it would be highly unlikely for any organic life form to consume soup only in dust form, which implies that Mars must have once had water to turn the soup dust into actual soup. 2. It turns out that Elysium Mons, the fifth-highest mountain on Mars, is made almost entirely out of polyethylene foam. This, in an of itself, is not particularly notable or unexpected. More shocking was the discovery that there are holes in the mountain in the shape of long cylinders, as if someone — or some-MAR-one — had been extracting what can only be called “pool noodles.” While some experts suggest that instead, the foam was extracted to make swords for a sort of Martian SCA, most agree that the existence of pool noodles implies the existence of water, chlorine, and Marco Polo. 3. NASA scientists have uncovered shocking evidence that Dick Morris believes that there has never, ever been water on Mars. As one of the world’s most consistently wrong people, Morris’s statement nearly guarantees that the opposite is true. Nuclear physicists are currently lobbying Morris to declare that cold fusion is an impossibility.

Catwalk Poison

congratulations to Asa Akira for winning Performer of the Year earlier..

moral

Good investment read

If you're perfectly capable of running your own retirement savings, selecting the right mix of low-cost investments, rebalancing at the right time and not buying and selling out of fear or greed, then good for you. But the majority of people — maybe the vast majority — are not like that. They may be smart enough to do the right thing, in theory, but they forget or slip up or are taken in by well-meaning friends bearing stock tips or annuity-peddling scoundrels who make nice to them over free steak dinners. For people with more than $500,000 or so to invest, finding first-class help is hard but not impossible. If you have more than $1 million, you'll have your choice of many of the best financial advisers in town. But until recently, it was tough for people with a few hundred thousand dollars or less to find reasonably priced assistance, especially if they were insistent on putting money in the kind of low-cost investments that would not pay a commission or other fee to the person helping them. On Friday, the latest entrant in an increasingly crowded field of services trying to serve this customer is introducing its offering, which is called Rebalance IRA. As the name suggests, it exists only to help you with your Individual Retirement Account, perhaps one that you'll fill with money that's been sitting around in several 401(k) or similar accounts at previous employers. Rebalance IRA representatives will talk with you about your goals, invest your money in a low-cost collection of index fundlike exchange-traded funds that don't try to make big bets on individual stocks, and rebalance the investments when necessary. In exchange, you agree to hand over one half of 1 percent of your assets each year, with a minimum annual fee of $500. The company's single-minded focus on retirement savings is somewhat narrow, but it makes sense given how much money is at stake and how badly many people mess things up when they do it on their own. There is more money in I.R.A.'s than in any other type of retirement vehicle, according to estimates from the Investment Company Institute. I.R.A. balances totaled $5.3 trillion at the end of the third quarter of 2012. That's more than the $5 trillion in 401(k), 403(b) and other similar plans; the $4.8 trillion in government retirement plans; and the $2.6 trillion in traditional pensions. (Read More: More Americans Raid Their 401(k)s to Pay Bills) According to the Department of Labor, the professionals who run pension plans earned an 8.3 percent annual return from 1991 to 2010. People fending for themselves in 401(k) and similar plans earned 7.2 percent. Nationwide I.R.A. performance figures are more scarce, though one 2006 study by the Center for Retirement Research put the figure for 1998 to 2003 at 3.8 percent annually, roughly 2 to 3 percentage points worse than pension fund managers and 401(k) investors did during that same period. These numbers are a bit squishy, given that pensions often make bets in markets that 401(k) investors can't access and the high fees that many 401(k) participants pay that pension managers don't. Still, there are about a thousand reasons plenty of do-it-yourselfers (who, after all, did not volunteer to manage their retirement money) would be likely to get worse returns than, say, pension managers. To start with, large numbers of people make extreme bets. At Vanguard, 10 percent of retirement plan participants invested only in stocks in 2011, while 8 percent had no stocks at all. At least this is better than 2004, when 35 percent of its customers were that far out of balance. Then, there are the emotional challenges. To stick with the mix of investments you've selected, you need to sell things that have done well and buy investments that have lagged recently. That's hard to do. Then there's the grab bag of other feelings. The bad experience with a broker you may have had in the past. The spouse who may scold you for doing the wrong thing. The fear that may have caused you to bail out in early 2009 or the greed that has you pouring money into stocks today, now that they're looking up again. This can be intensely hazardous to your long-term financial health. All of this should be self-evident, but because we're playing on the field of emotions, it isn't. Still, it wasn't immediately obvious to Mitch Tuchman, the man behind Rebalance IRA, who started a service for do-it-yourself index investors called MarketRiders in 2008. A former software entrepreneur, Mr. Tuchman had a midlife conversion to passive investing and not trying to beat the market, and he wanted to help others invest in the same way. "We thought we could build such great software that we could turn everyone into a do-it-yourselfer," he said. "And people said they didn't have time or they didn't care to do it themselves." MarketRiders charges subscribers $150 a year for instructions on how to adjust their portfolios and when, and it will continue to exist. But Mr. Tuchman, who had also started managing millions of dollars on the side for friends and family who simply could not be bothered to do it themselves, eventually realized that his sideline was where the real mass-market opportunity lay. So why would you let this guy handle your money? It's a perfectly reasonable question, and plenty of start-ups in the money management space don't do a particularly good job of answering it. "It's surprising to me how many entrepreneurs go on and on about the lack of trust in big financial institutions," said Grant Easterbrook, a senior research associate at Corporate Insight who published a guide this week to money management start-ups. "But they're not putting forward the people behind the product who actually make the investment decision. Who am I trusting if the euro breaks up or we mint a trillion-dollar coin?" Mr. Tuchman has anticipated this concern and he and his co-founder, Scott Puritz, rounded up an investment advisory board that includes Burton G. Malkiel, the emeritus Princeton economics professor who wrote "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" among other books; Charles D. Ellis, author of "Winning the Loser's Game" and a former Vanguard board member; and Jay Vivian, who once ran I.B.M.'s retirement plans. (Read More: 'Gimmick' in Cliff Deal Counts on Mass IRA Conversions) The group has created a collection of investment portfolios, most of which have a slight tilt toward small stocks, which tend to outperform the overall stock market over time. Many of the portfolios are also currently spiced up with indexed investments in high-dividend stocks and emerging market bonds. Besides the annual fee based on assets, there's a $250 fee to get started, and you must move your I.R.A. accounts to Schwab or Fidelity if they're not already there. Mr. Malkiel, who describes himself as the informal investment adviser to Princeton widows, will not be talking to you on the phone, alas. That task falls to Rebalance IRA staff. Mr. Tuchman is looking to hire a few more, including emotionally intelligent M.B.A. types with some finance in their background who may have been home with children the last few years and want to get back into the work force. Customers will be able to speak with them via videoconference and talk to the same person each time. Neither these workers nor Rebalance IRA earns any fees from the companies that provide the investments. All of Rebalance IRA's revenue will come from its customers, and as a registered investment adviser, Rebalance IRA is legally bound to act in those customers' best interest. There are other, cheaper ways to find someone to put your money in a portfolio like those at Rebalance IRA and run the money for you (though Mr. Tuchman insists that his service will offer more human contact). A company called Wealthfront, which has also put Mr. Malkiel to work, will do something similar for about 0.25 percent annually. Investors at Betterment, which slashed its prices last year, now pay about 0.3 percent on average, and the company has taken in nearly $100 million since it cut its fees. People with more than $100,000 invested there pay only 0.15 percent annually and can get advice from the founder himself, Jon Stein. Still, he said that not many people had sought him out and even then it was usually just to make sure they were on track with their goals. "Most situations are well-handled by software," he said. "In the long term, that's going to be the way most people get their advice. We're replacing the investment adviser with software." (Read More: Hunting for Yield? One Place You May Not Have Looked) That's a pretty bold statement, and the big online brokers don't necessarily see it that way. "Most people don't sign off $50,000 of savings without talking to somebody, looking someone in the eye," said Lule Demmissie, managing director of investment products and retirement for TD Ameritrade, who oversees its Amerivest line of managed portfolios. "We've found that it's a necessary part of the process." Mr. Tuchman agrees. But he's betting that his portfolios and service can be as good as what TD Ameritrade, Schwab, Vanguard, and Fidelity offer, without charging quite so much for it. Even if he fails, someone else is going to seize on the formula and succeed with it. Good investment advice costs too much, and not enough people with under $1 million to invest end up with decent guidance. My bet is that the online brokers' prices will look a lot more like Mr. Tuchman's or Mr. Stein's before long. http://www.cnbc.com/id/100392810

Wal-Mart’s iPhone 5 Offer

Wal-Mart’s iPhone 5 Offer: $45 Unlimited Plan, No Contract Required If you’ve dreamed of the day when you could get an iPhone without being chained to a two-year contract, or if you’re just interested in a cheaper monthly phone bill, this one’s for you. Just yesterday, Straight Talk (a division of TracFone) announced that beginning this Friday, January 9th, the company will begin offering the iPhone 4 and iPhone 5 in Wal-Mart stores around the country, completely contract-free. Here are the pricing details: iPhone 4 (8gb model only) will be $449 iPhone 5 (16gb model only) will be $649 As for your wireless plan, Straight Talk has two options: a $45 monthly plan with unlimited talk, text and data; or a $60 monthly plan that includes the same unlimited talk, text and data, plus unlimited calling to around 1,000 international destinations. As for coverage and high-speed data: Straight Talk uses the big four wireless carrier networks in the U.S. No details were provided yet on whether or not the iPhone 5 will have access to 4G LTE, which is available from three of the big four networks. If it’s Verizon’s network that the iPhone 5 will be operating on through Straight Talk, that’s a huge win for prepaid-loving customers, since Verizon’s 4G LTE network is, by far, the most widespread. http://www.zagg.com/community/blog/iphone-5-comes-to-straight-talk-with-45-unlimited-plan-no-contract-required/?utm_source=Blog