Thank You's and Portfolio News

I would like to thank a couple of sites that have picked up my posts, give them some publicity and also ask you to check them out as I like to work they are doing.

The Stock Masters: These guys are great. They take a real irreverent look at investing and companies and their site is filled with "blasts from the past" from TV and movies. Some investing sites can be painfully dry but this is definitely not one of them. Here you can get good quality advice mixed with a chuckle or two. It is easy to navigate and best of all the advice covers a wide variety of stocks and industries.

Seeking Alpha: An aggregated site, Seeking Alpha takes articles from contributors (like yours truly) and re-posts them. It is a great site for research. Simply type in the name or the symbol of the company you are interested in and you can read all the posts from contributors on it. This is a great feature as it will give you both the pros and cons of company. Several of the contributors are regulars on CNBC so their thoughts are worth considering if for no other reason they will be widely disseminated. If you are interested in just the views of a particular contributor you can find those also. Their email alerts let you know when a post concerning either a company, contributor or sector is available. They also post earnings calls transcripts that you can access for details.

Value Investing News: This is a community driven site in which users "vote" for the top stories. It has a lot of in depth analysis focused on value themes. If you look through the site you will find posting that look familiar.


News:

ADM: Announced a $377 million dollar stock buyback on 2/14. This will repurchase about 10.8 million shares based on today's price. I just love these things...

DOW: Announced a quarterly dividend of 37.5 cents per share payable on 4/30 to holders of record on 3/30. This means if you want the dividend you must own the stock before 3/30.

OC: Something looks to be happening here. OC normally trades about 380,000 shares a day. On Thursday, shares jumped over 6% on 7 times its normal number of shares traded (2.8 million). What does that mean? It means somebody(s) with big bucks was in the market buying up shares. Now, OC reports earnings on Wednesday 2/21 so word may be getting out on the stock (Or they are maybe reading ValuePlays?). Here is hoping you bought weeks ago when I recommended it.