For a value investor’s stock the four most important days of the year are when the company quarterly results come out. This is the time of the year when public companies take a break from their secrecy and announce to their holders what they’ve achieved, through webcasts and conference calls, and often, what they expect to achieve in the future.

Having switched to using Google’s great calendaring service, I found that it is a little bit difficult to keep track of the quarterly meetings on any of the calendar apps, web or not, unless you add them one by one yourself. This should come as a surprise, as both Google Finance and Yahoo! Finance have your portfolio saved and should present you with the option of adding the information directly to your calendar.

Having not found anything that even remotely accomplishes this, I’ve written a public service that will do just this: configure once, and forget for all eternity.

This is essentially an earnings announcement calendar aggregator. I’ve named it MyEarnCal for short for now. You don’t need to create a portfolio, account, pay me any money, or anything like that at all (it’s free.)

You can use it right away through any calendaring service that supports iCal, like Google Calendar. Subscribe to the following calendar:

http://cmichae.acm.jhu.edu/myearncal/MSFT+AMZN

Substituting MSFT+AMZN for any list of stock tickers you’d like. For example

http://cmichae.acm.jhu.edu/myearncal/GOOG+GE+JNJ

will show earnings announcements for Google, General Electric, and Johnson and Johnson. And you don’t have to do anything at all for the next batch, it will automatically show up.

This is still in beta; the only missing feature, is accurate reporting of the time of the press conference. Right now, all After Market conferences will show as 4:30 events, while Pre-Market events will show as 9:00 events. For now, it accomplishes the essential feature, allowing you to add your share’s earnings announcements and corporate actions to the plethora of calendars that take the iCalendar standard, such as Kontact/Korganizer, iCal, Google Calendar, Evolution, and Outlook 2007.

Here is the calendar for some favorites stocks to watch, as imported by Google Calendar:

Update: I’ve noticed that sometimes, it takes a while to load one of these calendars on Google Calendar. This happens because Google Calendar indexes the calendar at the address once, and will cache it for later. So one way to get around any error messages Google Calendar reports is to just wait a few hours and retry again with the exact same URI address.

Although this figure came out weeks ago during Apple’s Showtime event, I’d like to mention this, because it reinforces the prediction made in the iTunes sales statistics page, that 2 billion downloads will be reached by February 2007. As you can see from the graph on that page, the 1.5bn mark was predicted for the first half of September, which coincided with this announcement.

I’m very interested in seeing what kind of traffic iTunes movies will have; I am very enthused by the news that Wal*Mart might potentially work together with the iTunes store. Wal*Mart is the largest sole retailer of DVDs, but as I am sure, they realize the business of physical distribution of data has an expiration date.

At this point, the iTunes Store - a rename of the original iTunes Music Store - has huge potential. I am convinced the non-Disney studios have no choice but to eventually join, and I am happy Apple did not water down their terms of service (to the best of my knowledge) to appease them. iTunes presents a money-on-the-table opportunity for them, and they’d be crazy to not jump the wagon. I thus expect them to resist until the first quarter of 2007, right after the shopping season, where most DVDs are bought, largely as gifts. As this is not the market iTunes would serve well for now, their interest in joining iTunes is displaced by the potential alienation of their largest distributors, who would do a better job of serving the holiday season anyway.

Nothing brings me this much joy. I wish I had more nonsensical akwardly worded forms to fill in! Though most people file their taxes online, for us immigrants that’s not a choice. Thank goodness for these official IRS fill-in pdfs though; turns out I don’t have to use one of those pesky ink-in-a-stick writing utensils (so 20th century.)

Admittedly one of the few ways the Bloomberg Terminal distinguishes itself from the rest of the pack of financial data reporting, is the excellent News tracker. When you are viewing any chart, for example historical prices of a share, you can click on any point of the chart to view the news stories that occurred at that particular date and time.

I liked this little feature so much (it can make a lot of trends immediately obvious) that I’ve implemented my own little version for my news-equity correlation project, which could capture emailed Bloomberg stories and save them in a database. This was soon extended to capture stories from prespecified Google Alerts, and the task at hand was to learn to predict trends in the share price based on patterns in the news stories.It looks like Google has been busy. The all new, Google Finance site has this amazing little feature, and though it might not have as much content as Bloomberg, it is slick, functional, and appealing. I will be using this often.

Though the live iTunes counter was short lived, I’ve used the official data I automatically collected from the site plus the press release milestones Apple releases from time to time to predict the future.

It appears Apple will be hitting the 2 billion downloads mark sometime in early 2007 - I look forward to that.

Apple has given its investors a brand new insight into how well iTunes is doing:
Apple iTunes 1 Billion Dollar Countdown

Watch those iTunes songs download in real time! I’m wondering whether someone has been extracting statistics out of this so we can linearly predict the iTunes momentum for the next few quarters?

Update: I have started regularly collecting these statistics directly from Apple. You can find a report of sales in Apple iTunes Sales Statistics.

Final Update: Unfortunately Apple no longer maintains their countdown since the 1billionth song was downloaded - at least I didn’t put any more effort on the reports.

There’s a minor rebound underway today - AAPL is up around $0.80 on news of the new iPod shuffle price as well as the 1GB nano. On one hand, this is a good move that will allow the iPod to remain competitive. On the other hand, this could be news that Apple is losing it’s pricing power, and this might be bad news for earnings.

Either way, I’ve always underestimated the Shuffle component of the Apple Earnings - but at $69, its price compares to the most expensive flash memory cards out there for the equivalent amount of memory. Perhaps this will boost earnings, and attract more customers to digital media players and the Apple way.

Apple shares declined a whopping 6.33% today, possibly on rumors that sales for new macs might be hampered by a lag from software developers to switch to the Intel (INTC) platform, as well as news that CBS will be bypassing iTunes and will provide direct downloads of the show Survivor.
I have been watching the decline on intraday trading today trying to figure out why the sudden selloff - but I could find no major coverage on either one of the above possible explanations on the regular sources, among them the Dow Jones newswire, which only covered the CBS story.

The Survivor news might reflect a reasonable fear that the iTunes dominance might be short lived; I find that unlikely:

1. Survivor is the only show with which CBS is experimenting with direct downloads; it looks like its iTunes for everything else.
2. iTunes’ revenue is still primarily music, to the best of my knowledge.
3. People are used to iTunes; it’s easy, highly available and accessible, and works well with the iPod.
As far as the Intel switch goes, it looks like the primary concern was Adobe. This is nonsense; Adobe must have been waiting for years for this switch. Its products sell well for Macs, but they sell the very same identical products for Windows. Eliminating the PPC support will allow Adobe and all the companies that sell for both platforms to consolidate their codebases. This is easier than you might think - worst case, they can run their software under an emulated mode, and speed concerns might not be an issue since the Intel processors are, if you were to believe the hype, 4 times faster than their PPC `equivalents’.Let’s consider the other end on the other hand. The move to Intel allows a myriad software providers to publish on the Mac. Should things work as planned, we could see PC games being ported to the Mac, allowing Apple to tap a whole new market that has been ignored for years.

There’s a rather slim chance you’ve never heard of Jim Cramer. The former Goldman fund manager runs a show on CNBC now on which he makes stock recommendations. The show is actually quite entertaining, and the run-of-the-mill speculative analysis gives you some insight on how the better speculators out there work, and you would have to read a lot of pretty pedestrian stuff before you get this kind of exposure to speculative analysis.

Yesterday however, I found an article on Bloomberg detailing the market movers for the day. I quote from that article:

Apple Computer Inc. (AAPL US) rose $1.28, or 1.7 percent, to $78.95 and traded as high as $79.42. The maker of iPod digital media players and Macintosh computers was recommended by CNBC host Jim Cramer on his “Mad Money” show.

Gilead Sciences Inc. (GILD US) rose $1.18, or 2.1 percent, to $57.57 and traded as high as $57.91. The drugmaker was recommended by CNBC host Jim Cramer on his “Mad Money” show because of a study that showed a combination of two of Gilead’s drugs suppressed HIV better than a competing pill from GlaxoSmithKline Plc.

Oregon Steel Mills Inc. (OS US) rose $1.81, or 5 percent, to $37.82 and traded as high as $38.23. The steelmaker was recommended by CNBC host Jim Cramer on his “Mad Money” show on growing demand for steel and because the company is likely to be the takeover target of a larger rival.

Pearson Plc’s (PSO US) American depositary receipts, each representing one share, added 35 cents, or 2.8 percent, to $13.04 and traded as high as $13.25. The world’s largest educational publisher was recommended by CNBC host Jim Cramer on his “Mad Money” show.

Seagate Technology (STX US) added 68 cents, or 2.7 percent, to a high of $26.25. The world’s biggest maker of computer disk drives was recommended by CNBC host Jim Cramer on his “Mad Money” show.

As you can see, some of these aren’t particularly bad picks, but their broad adoption creates an adverse effect: a pretty significant correction the following day that kills the rally that took place upon the recommendation. At the time of this writing, AAPL was down 2.75%, GILD was down 1.36%, OS was up 1.76%, PSO was down 0.4%, and STX was down a chilling 3.3%. All but one of his reccomendations that is, lost or were on their way of losing their previous gains.
All this trading, both buying and selling, is completely unwarranted - it’s just noisy volatility. And don’t think there’s a pattern there to use in ‘timing techniques’, and don’t go short on his picks.
If you were curious to find out how these recommendations fare past the first week, Jim Cramer’s TheStreet.com tracks down Mr. Cramer’s track record. It is revealing that the site does not track how many bad calls and how many good calls he has had; only a top-twelve in each category. A quick glance on the two sites will give you the following statistic: his best-performing pick was up 23%, which is also the percentage his 12th worst performing pick went down. If you care to go back a little bit further in time, on February 2000, a month before the stock market begun to tumble, Jim Cramer proclaimed that dot-coms “are the only [stocks] worth owning right now.”
If you choose to blindly follow his word, you might be suffering from two conditions: The trader amnesia syndrome, and the survival bias syndrome.

I wrote on January 8th about Seagate Technologies. The closing price the previous trading day, Jan 6th, was $21.39. Today the stock opened at $25.00, a 17% increase in a period slightly longer than two weeks. During this time, an earnings announcement doubled its profits and gave it enough momentum to survive the sharp declines of Friday January 20th, and started a flurry of press coverage declaring that “Hard Drives aren’t dead yet.”

Unless you’re making a portable gadget, or something that will be the centerpiece of an office or living room, it doesn’t matter how appealing the technology behind the product is. “Sexy” hard-drives were the unreasonable expectation of the stock market for Seagate, and when everything else added up, the company (and also any company in the hard-drive industry) was a bargain. When bargains show up, consolidations follow, pricing power increases, and profits increase.
Should the 2% across the board decline of Friday continue, there will be plenty of bargains to buy if you don’t panic. Be both patient and reasonable with your expectations, and time will beat the market.