5 New Picks Made by This Billionaire Last Quarter

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Billionaire and Tiger Cub Stephen Mandel, with nearly $17 billion of assets under management, left his mentor Julian Robertson in 1997 to launch Lone Pine Capital. Hedge funds and other notable investors required to report their long holdings to the SEC do so quarterly with 13F filings. The most recent third quarter 13F for Mandel?s Lone Pine showed a number of shakeups in its portfolio. We have identified Mandel?s five largest stocks that were new positions for Lone Pine during the third quarter (Check out the big tech stocks billionaire Mandel was selling in 3Q).

Mandel?s largest new stock pick was Schlumberger

(NYSE: SLB)
, which is now the 12th largest 13F holding for Mandel, making up 2.8% of Lone Pine?s 3Q 13F. Schlumberger provides products and services to the oil and gas industry, and as a result is tied to its performance quite heavily. Schlumberger is expected to grow revenues at 8% in 2012 and 12% in 2013 on the back of elevated oil prices and production.

Compared to other notable industry operators, Halliburton Company and National Oilwell, Schlumberger trades on the high end at 17x earnings, with the other two trading below 13x. We believe the oil and gas company?s international focus warrants this premium, given its greater geographical diversification. On a forward-looking basis, the oil products company only trades at 14x year-ahead earnings.

Another new position for Mandel in 3Q was VeriSign

(NASDAQ: VRSN)
, also around 2.8% of Lone Pine?s 13F. VeriSign is trading around $40, off from its $50 high for the year, despite the tech company?s reassurance that the DOC will approve its key contract for servicing .com and .net registries. Mandel sees as much as 50% upside to the tech company in the next couple years given its cash generating capabilities. Mandel also sees little downside to the stock even if the DOC does make an unexpected decision given VeriSign?s exclusivity in being able to service .com and .net registries. It appears that investors are over discounting VeriSign?s earnings for next year, as it trades at only 19x forward earnings compared to 25x trailing, which means the stock has the potential to surprise investors.

Dunkin' Brands 

(NASDAQ: DNKN)
, after a new position in 3Q, now makes up 1.28% of Lone Pine?s 13F. Dunkin?s trailing P/E appears high at 60x, but its forward P/E of 20x helps suppress some overvaluation talks. We like Dunkin?s growth prospects given its potential for expansion in the U.S., not to mention internationally. The quick-stop coffee and food shop is expected to grow revenues by 6.2% in 2013, with sell-side analysts predicting annual EPS growth of 17% over the next five years. New stores and strong comp sales, expected to be up 4% by the end of this year, give us reason to believe that Dunkin' could be a buy. Its forward P/E of 20x is below what Starbucks and Caribou trade at on a trailing basis, 28x and 23x, respectively.

J.B. Hunt 

(NASDAQ: JBHT)
, the transportation and delivery company, now makes up 1.2% of Mandel?s 13F holdings. JB Hunt is up over 30% year to date and now trades well above the industry average of around 14.5x with a trailing P/E at 24x. Since 2008, freight volume has been rising, but we see a slowing of freight volume growth for the industry as a headwind for JB. The transporter operates mainly in the U.S. and has high exposure to fuel prices, where the bullish outlook does not bode well for JB?s margins. Interestingly, however, insiders have been buying JB lately.

Mandel appeared to be optimistic about travel stocks in 3Q. Major travel site Priceline.com was his firm?s largest stock holding, and he took a new stake in TripAdvisor (NASDAQ: TRIP)

, which now accounts for 1.15% of Lone Pine?s 13F. TripAdvisor claims one of the largest online communities as its customer base. The travel website focuses on reviews and advertising, versus facilitating actual travel bookings. This niche should allow the company to grow revenues at an expected 19% in 2012, 17% in 2013 and 15% in 2014. Expedia spun off TripAdvisor last year, but the recent Kayak acquisition could open the door for more industry M&A, and TripAdvisor could be a nice candidate, trading at 20x on a forward-earnings basis.

We believe that Mandel sees strong future demand for oil and gas as the global economy begins to strengthen. Schlumberger has a vast product base, and it still trades relative to the company?s growth prospects. We also like Mandel?s VeriSign thesis, given no other company made a bid for the contract, which would allow the tech company to continue to facilitate registries. Dunkin?s solid growth prospects give good reason to check out the company, but J.B. Hunt?s valuation gives us reason to stay on the sidelines. TripAdvisor operates in a bit more of a niche market than some of the other well known travel websites, given it is more of a marketer, and so we like its prospects and potential as a takeover target.

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Source: http://feeds.fool.com/~r/usmf/foolwatch/~3/aYeazKe86u0/story01.htm

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Should You Consolidate Debt With 0% Balance Transfer Credit Card Offers?

Consolidation Loans For People with Bad Credit With the new CARD act, a lot of card companies started to change their business models which helped in making zero percent credit card balance transfers a very rare commodity according to the wall street journal. But there are still a few and when properly executed, they can [...]

The post Should You Consolidate Debt With 0% Balance Transfer Credit Card Offers? appeared first on legal debt help online.

Source: http://www.legaldebthelponline.com/2012/06/28/should-you-consolidate-debt-with-0-balance-transfer-credit-card-offers/

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Happy Consequence Of Climate Change: Bigger Sweet Potatoes

sweet potato

Rising levels of carbon dioxide could lead to bigger sweet potatoes, new research indicates. It could also increase yields of other important crops, like rice and wheat, previous findings showed.

New Scientist has the story:

Hope Jahren at the University of Hawaii at Manao and colleagues grew the plants at four CO2 concentrations: the current level of 390 parts per million, as well as 760, 1140 and 1520 ppm. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that atmospheric CO2 levels will be between 500 and 1000 ppm by the year 2100.

For the least extreme scenario at 760 ppm, the team found the tubers grew up to 96 per cent larger.

Great news!

Except the researchers don't know if these tubers are any more or less nutritious than their average sized counterparts. If they aren't as nutritious, the larger size may not be all that helpful to the hungry masses. Studies of other crops indicated that protein levels in other crops grown at higher carbon dioxide concentrations was lower.

The researchers also didn't consider how climate change may impact the rainfall in regions that grow sweet potatoes. Climate changes — like the drought that's plaguing most of the US — could result in decreased crop yields.

Jahren will present the findings at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco in December.

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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/businessinsider/~3/ax2qV4tY90A/climate-change-yeilds-big-sweet-potatoes-2012-11

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4 Easy Habits That Boost Productivity

model photograph

The technology age has made it easier to get distracted as surfing for anything on the web is a quick click away.

For smaller companies, this decrease in productivity is extremely costly since resources are slim. Therefore, workers have to be as productive as possible. This is also true if you work from home. 

“It can be incredibly hard to stay focused when you work for yourself, because there’s no boss over your shoulder or IT department monitoring your internet usage,” Kelly Gurnett, career expert and blogger, told us.

“If you want to spend hours on Facebook or Amazon.com, you can, technically–but you really can’t, because then your projects won’t get completed and your business will suffer.

To get a better understanding of the most effective way to work, we turned to Gurnett and Dan Schawbel, founder of Millennial Branding, a Gen Y research and management consulting firm, who have both built successful businesses on their own without much supervision. Here are their tips:

1. Know your internal clock. In order to better concentrate, Gurnett works around her internal clock, which determines how productive you are at different times in the day. 

For example, Gurnett is more of an early bird and she knows she can write “a handful of blog posts without losing focus, drawing a blank, or feeling the siren call of Facebook or Twitter” in the mornings, so this is when she produces content. 

In the afternoon, her brain is less creative so she uses this time to finish tasks such as proofreading, formatting posts, and billing. 

2. Make a to-do list. Even if you already know what you need to complete, it’s better to have the list right in front of you. Schawbel told us that he creates a list with big things he needs to accomplish every week. 

“It’s an ongoing list, but I do it so that even if I veer off, I know what I need to get done,” he said. To know what’s urgent, Schawbel highlights these tasks in red and completes them within a few days.

3. Check your e-mail in intervals. Checking your e-mail can be addicting, especially since it’s so easy now to access it on smartphones. To stop herself from wasting too much time replying to e-mails, Gurnett limits how often she checks her messages. 

“I usually check my messages in the morning, at lunch and midway through the afternoon, and I try to process as many of them as I can in one sitting: read them, respond to them as necessary, delete them,” she said.

4. Reply immediately. Even though Gurnett limits checking her e-mails down to a minimum, once she does check it, she makes sure she answers it.

“Once I’ve opened a message, I make myself take some sort of action on it,” she said. “I can’t just mark it for later since that just creates twice as much work in the long run.”

Schawbel agrees with this habit.

He told us that when he sees an e-mail, he responds immediately because if not, it’s possible to lose out on an opportunity. “I once lost a TV appearance on CNN because I waited to think about it,” he said.

“If it’s a thing that requires more thought, it’s still good to e-mail them back to ask if you can get back to them at the end of the week.” 

Whatever your methods are for staying on task, you need to learn how to work as efficient as possible, and the best way of doing that is knowing yourself and understanding when and where you work best. “The more sense the schedule makes for you, the easier it will be to stick to,” Gurnett said.

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Key Factors Driving Nvidia?s $20 Valuation

There are certain factors that contribute to our long-term belief in the company: strong demand for Kepler, significant product wins for Tegra 3 processors, and the upcoming integrated 4G LTE application processors.

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2012/11/21/key-factors-driving-nvidias-20-valuation/

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Best Buy Website Runs Ads For Competing Websites

Lots of large websites run Google ads in order to generate a bit of cash without having to actively sell an ad module. But the folks at Best Buy might want to rethink this strategy, as many of the Google ads on BestBuy.com are linking to deals at competing e-tailers.

Consumerist reader Paul was looking for memory card readers on … [More]

Source: http://consumerist.com/2012/11/21/best-buy-website-runs-google-ads-for-competing-websites/

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Key Factors Driving Nvidia?s $20 Valuation

There are certain factors that contribute to our long-term belief in the company: strong demand for Kepler, significant product wins for Tegra 3 processors, and the upcoming integrated 4G LTE application processors.

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2012/11/21/key-factors-driving-nvidias-20-valuation/

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Both Benghazi And The Petraeus Scandal Suggest US Media Is Way Too Cozy With The State

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If there is just one lesson to take away from the Benghazi and Petraeus affairs it's that the American media is way too cozy with heads of state.

Immediately following the Benghazi crisis, U.S. media did its due diligence and flexed its sources, anonymous and otherwise, to uncover the truth about the attack — but then they purposely failed report the details because of requests from the CIA and the Obama administration.

Michael Calderon of The Huffington Post reports that the AP, The New York Times and The Washington Post all withheld information at the behest of the CIA. Calderon also details how other news outlets failed to mention the true ties of CIA contractors Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods.

From his report:

ABC News, for example, reported that Doherty had been working to "round up dangerous weapons" in the country. One national security reporter told The Huffington Post that it was an "open secret" in national security circles that the former SEALs were working for the CIA.

The AP even went so far as to edit a Sept. 21 story it wrote, which revealed the employment status of Woods and Doherty; ensuring the edited version made no mention of Woods and Doherty's employment the CIA.

A statement written to HuffPo from AP spokesman Paul Colford:

"We omitted mention of the two former SEALs' CIA connection in subsequent versions of the story after CIA officials insisted that other lives would be endangered."

Another statement, from the New York Times, echoed this sentiment: "[We] agreed to withhold locations and details of these operations at the request of Obama administration officials, who said that disclosing such information could jeopardize future sensitive government activities and put at risk American personnel working in dangerous settings."

Assuming they knew exactly how disclosing such information would put people in danger is one thing, maybe some of the operations were ongoing. But if they weren't exactly sure, if they just suppressed coverage on behalf of a basic request, then they're sacrificing journalistic integrity in order to be complicit in the cover-up of botched covert operations.

A far cry from printing the Pentagon Papers 60 years ago exposing the administration during the Vietnam War, the media is largely in cahoots with today's higher-up government officials. Unlike the Pentagon Papers, the Benghazi coverage shows how the CIA suppressed media reporting under a blanket "national security" statement.

CNN even fired one of its up-and-coming investigative reporters because of fallout from a documentary she produced about unrest in Bahrain during the Arab Spring, something neither the Bahrain government nor the U.S. military wanted publicized.

Most recently, this cozy relationship with the administration is typified by the David Petraeus sex scandal.

The CIA and the "Intelligence Community" are officially not supposed to have working journalists on the payroll, but where are the rules for book authors? The case of Paula Broadwell, a writer tasked with the portrayal of the most powerful spook in the U.S., shows an obvious blurring of professional lines and a blatant disregard for conflicts of interest.

An attempt to be as impartial as possible would have looked like this: leaving duty as an intelligence officer with the military and rendering her Top Secret clearance inactive.

She did neither and remained very much on the intel community payroll as an Army reservist while she was contracted through a private publishing company to write a biography of General David Petraeus (Ret.). With so many ethical lines already blurred, the pair added one more and began a sexual affair.

Then word got out about that relationship.

The following flurry of hasty reporting about Petraeus exposed an easily charmed media that had eaten up the General's charisma and blindly endorsed almost every platform he put forward, regardless of whatever facts might have been on the ground at the time. 

Michael Hastings, the former Rolling Stone writer who reported former General Stanley McCrystal out of a job, had this to say about the situation:

Petraeus’ first biographer, former U.S. News and World Report reporter Linda Robinson, wrote a book about him, then went to CENTCOM to work for him. Yes — a so-called journalist published a book about him, then started getting a paycheck from him soon after. This went largely unremarked upon.

Another huge supporter was Tom Ricks, a former Washington Post journalist who found a second career as unofficial press agent for the general and his friends. Ricks is the ringleader of what I like to call “the media-military industrial complex,” setting the standard for its incestuous everyday corruption. He not only built Dave up, he facilitated the disastrous liaison between Broadwell and Petraeus. Ricks helped get Broadwell a literary agent, a six-figure book deal, and a publisher.

Some journalists even came out and said they'd taken the bait, like Danger Room's Spencer Ackerman, who wrote, "When it came out that CIA Director David Petraeus had an affair with his hagiographer, I got punked."

From Ackerman's post:

Like many in the press, nearly every national politician, and lots of members of Petraeus’ brain trust over the years, I played a role in the creation of the legend around David Petraeus. The biggest irony surrounding Petraeus’ unexpected downfall is that he became a casualty of the very publicity machine he cultivated to portray him as superhuman. I have some insight into how that machine worked.

Whether it's withholding information, even deleting previously reported information (like the AP did) at a government's request, or intentionally propagating a less than accurate portrayal of American leaders, these transgressions have exposed a media that's not as free as it publicizes itself to be.

NOW READ: There's a reason the reports coming out of Benghazi are so confusing >

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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/businessinsider/~3/vXCsHohJ8oU/benghazi-petraeus-debacles-illustrate-how-media-is-way-too-cozy-with-the-state-2012-11

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Don?t Fall For False Security Of ?Defensive? Stocks

There seems to be nothing to gain by repositioning into the so-called defensive stocks or sectors. In fact, by doing so one may come out the other side even more damaged than by holding onto current holdings.

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2012/11/20/dont-fall-for-false-security-of-defensive-stocks/

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Benefits of Credit Card Debt Consolidation

Consolidation Loans with Bad Credit Is debt consolidation a good solution for my credit card debts? Debtors, upon realizing that in a few years their credit cards would have accumulated thousands of dollars through interests ask the same question. Credit card purchases, in many instances are actually more expensive because of high interest rates. Someone [...]

The post Benefits of Credit Card Debt Consolidation appeared first on legal debt help online.

Source: http://www.legaldebthelponline.com/2012/06/29/benefits-of-credit-card-debt-consolidation/

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