Analyst Upgrades

• Cisco (CSCO) to outperform from perform at Oppenheimer.
• Cognizant (CTSH) to buy from neutral at Goldman.
• Polypore (PPO) to outperform from neutral at RW Baird.
• Elan (ELN) to buy from neutral at UBS.
• Millicom (MICC) and NuStar GP Holdings (NSH) to overweight from equal weight at Morgan Stanley.
• Teekay LNG (TGP) to equal weight from underweight at Morgan Stanley.
• American Railcar (ARII) to outperform from market perform at Morgan Keegan.
• Texas Instruments (TXN) to buy from neutral at Sterne Agee.

BloggingStocks recently ran a series of posts called "Stocks for a Volatile Market" in which I argued that shoe maker Steven Madden (NASDAQ: SHOO) was currently priced with much less worthy peers (lower margins, most notably) and loaded with free options and potential catalysts.

While I thought that many of my team's posts made great sense, I take great issue to Sheldon Liber's post on FreightCar America (NASDAQ: RAIL). I have no issues with Sheldon's long term investment record, investing philosophy, or most of his ideas, but I think that this post had several great problems.

Most importantly, Sheldon seemed to purposely neglect considering the future potential of this company by saying that he focuses "not forward projections and guessing, but real facts. It is way too hard to predict the future." But therein lies the entire problem, he neglected the fact that he was looking at an absolute cyclical peak in operations for the company!

He then cited the metrics for the stock (emphasis his): "The P/E is 5.51, the P/S is 0.49, IT HAS ZERO DEBT!, with an ROE and ROI of 87 and an ROA of 47 - that's incredible!"