Check The Buzz On Apple - Peak Earnings Season Kicks Off

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  BARRON'S COVER

  Citi's World of Promise

  By Sandra Ward

  The banking giant's new CEO vows to wring more profit from its global franchise. Asset sales and a tax break should get him there.

Barron's: The Electronic Investor: Check The Buzz On Apple
Jul 13 at 00:03

 Ever wonder what people are saying about your stocks? Tracking

social-media sentiment about companies has become a regular part of portfolio

management for many traders and investors in the last couple of years. If you're

one of them, or just curious, it's definitely worth looking at a new Website

from Market Prophit.

      Marketprophit.com, which is free while in beta testing, displays

interpretations of conversations taking place on a variety of social media,

delivering bullish and bearish signals to members. It's an intriguing idea,

particularly because the signals are generated in real time, using quantitative

analytics.

      Stocks that are the focus of social-media attention, primarily from

Twitter for now, show up on the Top Ten and Bottom Ten lists, where they are

ranked by a sentiment calculation that ranges from +1 to -1. The more positive

the reading, the more bullish the sentiment.

      These lists automatically update about once a minute, or you can refresh

your browser to get an up-to-the-second reading.

      Clicking on a ticker symbol in the list, or entering a ticker symbol in

the search box at the top of the screen, generates an entire page about that

particular stock showing the sentiment reading throughout the trading day as

well as traditional price and volume graphs. The company page also displays the

most recent posts on Twitter about that ticker symbol as well as its

fundamentals. The number of tweets posted per minute is interesting, especially

for much-discussed companies such as Apple (ticker: AAPL) or Google (GOOG).

There's a "word cloud" displayed for each company, which is a visual display of

the nouns and verbs most often used in tweets and other posts on social media.

      Heat maps show, by sector or by exchange, what's hot and what's not at any

given moment, using shades of green and red. There are quite a few sites and

online brokerages that use heat maps to indicate price movement and trading

volume, but this one shows the stocks, by sector, that are being talked about. A

recent sentiment heat map for technology stocks, for example, showed bright

green for Microsoft (MSFT), meaning the talk was positive, and bright red for

BlackBerry (BBRY), suggesting the opposite. The "Buzz" heat map gives an

indication of the most talked-about stocks; those with the most "Buzz" are

displayed in larger boxes.

      You can personalize a dashboard with the stocks you're most interested in,

either by typing in the symbols, or selecting from one of the Top/Bottom Ten

lists by clicking on the appropriate icon. You can also set up alerts for

specific stocks, which will send you an e-mail when triggered. For instance, you

might want to be notified if a stock you just bought has a sudden downturn in

sentiment, which would let you know it's time to consider setting a stop-loss

order. An upturn could provide an opportunity to write a covered call against

one of your current long positions.

      It's free, for now, and provides food for thought as well as some

actionable signals. I'd like to see a way to generate a graph that plots the

Market Prophit sentiment signals against stock prices as well as the ability to

add a sector to the dashboard.

      ETF Database offers traders and analysts numerous ways to slice and dice

the universe of exchange-traded funds. I like its list of the 100 highest

year-to- date ETF returns as an idea generator. Another great tool for those

considering exiting high-cost mutual funds is the mutual-fund-to-ETF-converter,

which suggests ETF alternatives.

      A recently launched tool for the budget-minded is ETFdb's (etfdb.com) list

of the cheapest ETFs, which displays the 100 funds with the lowest expense

ratios. Two Schwab-sponsored ETFs, the Schwab U.S. Broad Market ETF (SCHB) and

the Schwab U.S. Large-Cap ETF (SCHX) top this list with expense ratios of just

0.04% . For contrast, the site also lists the 100 ETFs with the highest expense

ratios.

      On that list, the "winner" is the Teucrium Sugar fund (CANE), with a 2.32%

expense ratio -- which is a higher expense ratio than most actively managed

mutual funds.

Columns

THE STRIKING PRICE

Pretzel Logic at the Fed

By STEVEN M. SEARS

Don't view the decline in the VIX as an all-clear sign for stocks. Betting on an earnings bump for CBOE.

Coming up this week: 

     -- Diamond Resorts International is set to price 15.5 million shares at
$16 to $18 each; also on the roster: Rexford Industrial Realty looks to price
16 million shares at $13 to $15 apiece; RetailMeNot, 9.09 million shares at
$20 to $22; and Silver Eagle Acquisition, 25 million shares at $10 each.
      -- A bankruptcy court in New York weighs a $10 million settlement of
litigation in Extended Stay's leveraged buyout.
      -- BB&T, Capital One Financial and Key Corp. report quarterly results.
      Friday 19
      -- G-20 finance ministers, central bank governors begin meetings in
Moscow.
      -- Electrolux meets investors in N.Y.
      Sunday 21
      -- Japan holds parliamentary elections.

Coming Earnings

 Day                    Quarter  Consensus   Year   Ticker
                                  Estimate    Ago
M
CitiGrp                   2Q       $1.18    $1.00    C
T
Johnson  &  Johnson       2Q        1.39     1.30    JNJ
Schwab (Charles)          2Q        0.19     0.20    SCHW
Coca-Cola                 2Q        0.63     0.61    KO
Goldman Sachs Grp         2Q        2.82     1.78    GS
Yahoo                     2Q        0.30     0.27    YHOO
CSX                       2Q        0.47     0.49    CSX
W
Abbott Labs               2Q        0.44     0.43    ABT
Kinder Morgan Holdco      2Q        0.33    -0.15    KMI
American Express          2Q        1.22     1.15    AXP
Int'l Business Mach       2Q        3.77     3.51    IBM
Intel                     2Q        0.39     0.54    INTC
eBay                      2Q        0.63     0.56    EBAY
PNC Fin'l Svcs            2Q        1.63     1.20    PNC
U.S. Bancorp              2Q        0.76     0.73    USB
Bank of America           2Q        0.25     0.17    BAC
Bank of NY Mellon         2Q        0.57     0.57    BK
Th
Morgan Stanley            2Q        0.43     0.29    MS
Google                    2Q       10.79    10.12    GOOG
Philip Morris Intl        2Q        1.41     1.36    PM
Verizon Comm              2Q        0.73     0.64    VZ
Stryker                   2Q        1.03     0.98    SYK
BB & T                    2Q        0.74     0.72    BBT
Johnson Controls          3Q        0.75     0.64    JCI
Baxter Int'l              2Q        1.13     1.12    BAX
Capital One Fin'l         2Q        1.70     0.82    COF
BlackRock                 2Q        3.84     3.10    BLK
Microsoft                 4Q        0.75     0.67    MSFT
Union Pacific             2Q        2.35     2.10    UNP
Danaher                   2Q        0.85     0.81    DHR
UnitedHealth Grp          2Q        1.25     1.27    UNH
F
Schlumberger              2Q        1.11     1.05    SLB
Honeywell Int'l           2Q        1.21     1.14    HON
General Electric          2Q        0.36     0.38    GE
State Street              2Q        1.19     1.01    STT

(Earnings are diluted and report dates are tentative. All forecasts and
 historical numbers exclude extraordinary items by accounting definitions.)

Source: Thomson First Call

This Weeks Economic Calender:

Day   Time

                                                 Consesus Est  Last Period

M    8:30   June Retail Sales                       0.7%         0.6%
    10:00   May Business Inventories                0.1%         0.3%
T    8:30   June CPI                                0.3%         0.1%
     9:15   June Industrial Production              0.3%         0.0%
     9:15   June Capacity Utilization              77.7%        77.6%
W    8:30   June Housing Starts                   950,000      914,000
Th  10:00   June Leading Indicators                 0.3%         0.1%
    10:00   June Philadelphia Fed Survey            7.8         12.5

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