Analyst upgrades:

• Deutsche Bank upgraded Garmin (NASDAQ: GRMN) to Hold from Sell as it believes the company's second half of 2009 is tracking better than expected due to retailer restocking. Deutsche raised its target on shares to $33 from $15 but thinks Garmin's long-term trends remain unfavorable.
• Goldman upgraded Fortune Brands (NYSE: FO) to Buy from Neutral citing potential EPS improvement driven by the Home division. Fortune Brands price target to $49 from $45. Note that the firm downgraded General Mills to Neutral from Buy.
• Oppenheimer upgraded FPIC Insurance (NASDAQ: FPIC) to Outperform from Perform to reflect the company's acquisition of Advocate MD and management's commitment to share repurchases. The firm set a $49 price target on the stock.
• PPG Industries (NYSE: PPG) and Olin Corp. (NYSE: OLN) were upgraded to Neutral from Sell at UBS.
• Synovus (NYSE: SNV) was upgraded to Neutral from Underperform at BofA/Merrill.
• Take-Two (NASDAQ: TTWO) was upgraded to Overweight from Neutral at Piper Jaffray.

Analyst upgrades:

• Morgan Stanley upgraded CNOOC Ltd (NYSE: CEO) to Equal Weight from Underweight to reflect higher crude oil price estimates.
  
• Goldman upgraded VMware (NYSE: VMW) to Conviction Buy from Neutral and raised its target to $29 from $27 following positive checks that indicate strong business actively. The analyst expects VMW's revenue growth to be up 9% in 2009 vs. expectations for overall IT spending to be down.
  
• UBS upgraded ON Semiconductor (NASDAQ: ONNN) to Buy from Neutral and raised its target to $5 from $3.80 based on positive Asia checks that indicate an improving demand outlook and that the company could beat near-term expectations.
• Vodafone (NYSE: VOD) was lifted to Buy from Neutral at Goldman and to Overweight from Equal Weight at Morgan Stanley.
  
• Ashland (NYSE: ASH) was raised to Overweight from Neutral at JP Morgan.

MOST NOTEWORTHY: P.F. Chang's, ViroPharma and CSX Corp were today's noteworthy upgrades:

• Jefferies upgraded shares of P.F. Chang's (NASDAQ: PFCB) to Buy from Hold to reflect the company's capital preservation focus, which they believe will drive a best-in-class free cash flow yield in 2009. Despite upgrading shares, Jefferies lowered their target price to $28 from $31.
  
• Thomas Weisel raised ViroPharma (NASDAQ: VPHM) to Overweight from Market Weight on valuation as they believe the sell-off on the Lev Pharmaceuticals (LEVP) acquisition is unwarranted. The firm raised their target price to $15 from $10.
  
• Merrill upgraded CSX Corp. (NYSE: CSX) to Buy from Neutral based on valuation and improved results.

OTHER UPGRADES:

• Borg-Warner (NYSE: BWA) was upgraded to Outperform from Neutral at Baird.
  
• Credit Suiise raised Walgreen (NYSE: WAG) to Outperform from Neutral.
  
• SunTrust upgraded Arena Resources (NYSE: ARD), Bill Barrett (NYSE: BBG) and Concho Resources (NYSE: CXO) to Buy from Neutral.

Today is America Recycles Day! Why not do some recycling? Sure, I didn't cut down any trees to create these posts, but I think they're in the spirit of the day. Here are my two favorite posts from the past year.

Selling you a farm-fresh lifestyle in a box, bag or can

... By far my favorite image in any book is the overleaf of Blueberries for Sal, a bucolic and all-blue illustration of Sal and her mother. They are canning blueberries in a 40s-era kitchen, complete with hand-cranked egg beater, polka-dot curtains, and a cast-iron wood cooking stove. Every time I gaze at that picture I believe for a second that I will go downstairs and preserve something in one of the old-fashioned Ball jars I found at a garage sale.

Alas, it never quite happens that way, but just reading the book makes me feel connected to the farm-wife ideal. Much like a wander through today's grocery store aisles. As Kim Severson mentions in today's New York Times, she feels smug when she puts a bag of Cascadian Farm organic French fries in her grocery cart (she calls is "greenwashing" and the marketers call it "an authentic narrative"): "a gentle image of a field or a farm ... suggest[s] an ample harvest gathered by an honest, hard-working family." And in creating these images for us, in selling us the hard-working farm family, marketers know that just for a minute we've left our wired, fossil-fuel-guzzling lives for a hand-hewn pine kitchen table in that log house in Maine.

In short, we're being sold our ideal lifestyle in a box, bag or can. My ideal lifestyle shines like autumn sunset on the matt label of Pepsico, Inc. (NYSE:PEP)'s Lay's new Natural line of baked chips and Cheetos (natural Cheetos?!?), it smiles on me like the friendly cows on the label of Brown Cow's Cream Top yogurts. ... read more

Cage-free eggs: What are you paying for, and are they better?

Oklahoma turns 100 years old this year, and I wrote a bit about its business climate in my recent Investing in Oklahoma post. That post featured some growth companies based in Oklahoma: Arena Resources Inc. (NYSE: ARD), Helmerich & Payne Inc. (NYSE: HP), Unit Corp. (NYSE: UNT), Chesapeake Energy Corp. (NYSE: CHK), ONEOK Inc. (NYSE: OKE), Devon Energy Corp. (NYSE: DVN), and the Williams Companies (NYSE: WMB).

Earlier this year, the Motley Fool also took at look at Oklahoma companies, and focused on some of the same energy sector companies that I did. Its search also included two non-energy companies as well: drive-in burger chain Sonic Corp. (NASDAQ: SONC) for its growth potential, and Tulsa-based Dollar Thrifty Automotive (NYSE: DTG).

Sonic recently announced 21 consecutive years of positive same-store sales performance, and reaffirmed its 33 cents earnings per share earnings expectations for the fourth quarter. For fiscal 2008, Sonic expects earnings growth of 15% to 17%. The consensus of analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial is that Sonic is a buy. The share price was $23.40 at the close on Friday, up from a 52-week low of $20.02 in late July, not yet quite back to its 52-week high of $25.09 in May, but still up from its stumble at the end of August after an analyst's downgrade based on labor and dairy costs. That was before the announcement and reaffirmed expectations mentioned above. Also, Sonic made the Forbes list of 100 best mid cap stocks in America.

Oklahoma celebrates its centennial in November -- Happy Birthday, Oklahoma!

Today, Oklahoma is known as one of the most business-friendly states, due in part to low tax rates. Oklahoma's economy is based largely on the energy, aviation, and food processing sectors. From 2000 to 2006, Oklahoma's gross domestic product increased 50 percent. The GDP per capita grew almost 10 percent between 2005 and 2006, one of the highest rates in the nation.

Fortune magazine's 2007 list of the fastest growing companies in the U.S. included six from Oklahoma. At number three on the list was Tulsa-based Arena Resources Inc. (NYSE: ARD), a seven-year old oil and gas firm with a three-year annual growth rate of 165 percent. Back in August, Arena announced strong second quarter 2007 financial and operating results. Arena is also a major holding in the Bruce Fund, which recently made the 2007 Forbes Honor Roll.

Tulsa-based oil and gas driller Helmerich & Payne Inc. (NYSE: HP) had a three-year annual growth rate of 37 percent, which beat the S&P 500. In August, H&P announced strong second quarter 2007 results, as well as two new contracts. The Motley Fool sees expansion in other sectors as good news for drillers such as H&P.

Gasoline inventories dropped below their five-year average and are now 6% below last year's average, according to Joseph Dancy, an adjunct professor at Southern Methodist University, in an essay published in Barron's this weekend.

This means the outlook for investing in energy remains good, Dancy believes, as demand for gasoline will grow 2% with little supply relief in sight. Particularly the lack of new refinery capacity means positive growth prospects for a company like Matrix Service Company (NASDAQ: MTRX) that specializes in repair and maintenance services to the refining, distribution and pipelines sectors.

Dancy wrote the supply and demand balance for energy could mean a sharp escalation of energy prices. Mexico's Cantarell field's output, the second largest in the world as measured by output, declined 17% in March from year-earlier levels, while offset by new production increases at a nearby field, total crude production from Mexico is down 5%. In addition, Venezuela production should get hit at some point as Chavez has taken control of exploring for and producing energy away from the foreign experts. And Nigeria, who sends 1 million barrels per day to the US, is also in a politically tenuous situation.

Add to this, the huge swing producer, Saudi Arabia, announced that is will no longer increase production after 2009, which might indicate the nature of its oil reserves.

In addition to Matrix, Arena Resources Inc (NYSE: ARD), OMNI Energy Services Corporation (NASDAQ: OMNI), Pioneer Drilling Company (AMEX: PDC), Natural Gas Services Group Inc (AMEX: NGS) were mentioned as attractive investment ideas.