afl posts
FeedPosted Nov 4th 2009 11:40AM by Steven Halpern (RSS feed)
Filed under: Newsletters, AFLAC Inc (AFL), Colgate-Palmolive (CL), Stocks to Buy
"One way to build an inflation hedge into your investment cash flows is to focus on stocks that are likely to boost their dividends on a regular basis," explains dividend specialist Chuck Carlson.
In his The DRIP Investor, which focuses on blue chip companies offering dividend reinvestment programs, he notes, "Since dividends are paid with cold cash, they can't be faked. Either you pay the dividend or you don't. They can't be some figment of accounting magic." Here, he looks at three favorite blue chips with strong dividend records.
Continue reading Dividend growth trio: Aflac, Medtronic and Colgate-Palmolive
Posted Oct 31st 2009 10:10AM by Trey Thoelcke (RSS feed)
Filed under: Daimler (DAI), Sprint Nextel Corp (S), AFLAC Inc (AFL), Avon Products (AVP), Kellogg Co (K), Hershey Co (HSY), Procter and Gamble (PG), BP p.l.c. ADS (BP), McGraw-Hill Companies (MHP), General Dynamics Corp (GD), Nintendo (NTDOY)
Continue reading Earnings highlights: Aflac, Avon, BP, Hershey, Kellogg, Nintendo, P&G, Sprint ...
Posted Aug 19th 2009 5:00PM by John Jagerson (RSS feed)
Filed under: Aetna Inc (AET), AFLAC Inc (AFL)

Regardless of how you feel about a public health insurance option offered by the government, interest at the policy level seems to be waning recently. If Democrats drop the idea of a public option as a component of health care reform, health insurance companies could benefit.
The way I see it, if the government starts offering health insurance as a public provider then new supply will have entered the market. According to my college Econ 101 text book, that new supply would have shifted the supply and demand curves towards lower prices and maybe lower profits.
Continue reading Dropping the 'public option' could insure some stocks' health
Posted Jul 29th 2009 11:00AM by Eric Buscemi (RSS feed)
Filed under: Analyst reports, Analyst upgrades and downgrades, Campbell Soup (CPB), Coach Inc (COH), Morgan Stanley (MS), Dow Chemical (DOW), Analyst initiations
Analyst upgrades:
- Baird upgraded WinTrust (NASDAQ: WTFC) to Neutral from Underperform and raised its target to $20 from $13 citing the accretive purchase of AIG (NYSE: AIG) loans and reduced risk of a capital raise.
- Piper Jaffray upgraded Coach (NYSE: COH) to Overweight from Neutral on expectations product sell-throughs and margin trends will improve in the coming quarters. The firm has a $32 target on the stock.
- RBC Capital upgraded Campbell Soup (NYSE: CPB) to Sector Perform from Underperform and raised its target to $33 from $29. The firm cites Campbell's recent innovation, easy volume comps, and "reasonable" consensus estimates for its upgrade.
- Tata Motors (NYSE: TTM) was upgraded to Equal Weight from Underweight at Morgan Stanley.
- Rockwell Automation (NYSE: ROK) was upgraded to Buy from Neutral at BofA/Merrill.
- Fifth Third Bancorp (NASDAQ: FITB) was upgraded to Conviction Buy from Buy at Goldman.
Continue reading Analyst upgrades, downgrades and initiations: AFL, COH, CPB, DOW, MS, TTM ...
Posted Jul 26th 2009 12:30PM by Trey Thoelcke (RSS feed)
Filed under: Earnings reports, Forecasts, AFLAC Inc (AFL), MasterCard Inc'A' (MA)
The earnings crunch rolls on this coming week, with quarterly reports expected from Coach Inc. (NYSE: COH), Exxon Mobil (NYSE: XOM), Kellogg (NYSE: K), MasterCard (NYSE: MA), Motorola (NYSE: MOT), Sprint Nextel (NYSE: S), Travelers (NYSE: TRV), Time Warner (NYSE: TWX), U.S. Steel (NYSE: X), Viacom (NYSE: VIA), Walt Disney (NYSE: DIS), and many others.
Below are some reporting companies for which analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters have high hopes. What does that mean? Well, all of them are expected to report double-digit earnings grown in the most recent quarter. They have tended to offer positive surprises in recent quarters. They have long-term EPS growth forecasts of greater than 10%, and they have earnings multiples that are higher than their industry or sector averages, or higher than at least one top competitor. And they all have First Call consensus recommendations to buy.
Continue reading The week in preview: Some expected earnings winners
Posted May 28th 2009 5:40PM by Joseph Lazzaro (RSS feed)
Filed under: AFLAC Inc (AFL), Stocks to Buy
The market's flight-to-safety in late 2008/early 2009 spared few sectors, and it did not exempt the insurance sector, the upside of which is an insurance value or two for investors, and Aflac is one.
Aflac Incorporated (NYSE: AFL) is another one of those insurers that was rudely treated by Wall Street during the panic and paranoia that gripped markets with the onset of the global financial crisis. And it was rude: the Street took AFL's shares from a high of $68 to about $11, basically on the fear that Alfac would incur major losses from European bank hybrid bonds, including the threat of bank nationalization. To be sure, given the opaqueness surrounding much of the financial crisis, an AFL hair-cut was in order, but an 80% price drop? Please.
Continue reading Aflac's recent stock price rise is no accident
Posted Feb 1st 2009 12:30PM by Trey Thoelcke (RSS feed)
Filed under: Earnings reports, Forecasts, AFLAC Inc (AFL), Avon Products (AVP), MasterCard Inc'A' (MA), Northrop Grumman (NOC)
If you've been watching earnings this past week, or if you read last week's Week in Preview, then this coming week may leave you feeling a bit like Bill Murray in Groundhog's Day. That is, again analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters expect earnings declines to be more frequent and deeper than earnings gains.
Motorola Inc. (NYSE: MOT), Dow Chemical Co. (NYSE: DOW), Anadarko Petroleum Corp. (NYSE: APC), IAC Interactivecorp (NASDAQ: IACI), Moody's Corp. (NYSE: MCO), Elizabeth Arden Inc. (NASDAQ: RDEN), Devon Energy Corp. (NYSE: DVN), Diebold Inc. (NYSE: DBD), Tyco International Ltd. (NYSE: TYC), United Parcel Service (NYSE: UPS), Cisco Systems Inc. (NASDAQ: CSCO), Polo Ralph Lauren Corp. (NYSE: RL), ITT Corp. (NYSE: ITT), and Walt Disney Co. (NYSE: DIS) are scheduled to report quarterly results this week, and they're all expected to report double-digit declines in earnings.
But again this week, let's take a look who Wall Street feels may have done well in the past quarter.
Continue reading The week in preview: High hopes for MasterCard, Avon, Aflac, Northrop Grumman
Posted Dec 10th 2008 3:03PM by Zac Bissonnette (RSS feed)
Filed under: Business of sports
The Kansas City Star reports that the Arena Football League will cancel its 2009 season. Pete Likens, the director of communications for the Kansas City Brigade, told the newspaper that the players union agreed to the move last night and the owners will hold a final vote later today: "It's pretty much a done deal to suspend the 2009 season and work toward a single entity-league. We plan to start up again in 2010."
In 2006, the league sold a stake to ESPN and hoped that the increased television time would put it on solid financial footing, but clearly that didn't happen. The AFL had reportedly been working on a deal to sell a 40% stake to a private equity firm back in October in exchange for $100 million, but that didn't happen. The league has been without a commissioner since July.
The league has apparently decided that its survival will depend on a transition to a single-entity ownership structure, where a small group of investors own the league as a whole. Currently, the league is operated similar to the way the NFL is, with individual franchisees owning each team.
Bored NFL fans will now have to find something more productive to do with their summers.
Posted Oct 19th 2008 12:30PM by Trey Thoelcke (RSS feed)
Filed under: Earnings reports, Forecasts
Wall Street's optimism in last week's preview about the earnings of tech stocks wasn't misplaced, as there were many more positive surprises than negative ones among the stocks we looked at. This week will bring plenty more data for investors in and watchers of the sector to mull over. Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL), AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T), and Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT), for example, are expected by analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial to post modest earnings gains from a year ago, to $1.11 per share (on $8.1 billion in sales), $0.72 per share (on $31.3 billion in sales), and $0.47 per share (on $14.8 billion in sales) respectively. All three of these companies ended the week closer to their 52-week lows than highs, and analysts on average consider them each a buy.
Here's a look at some of the week's biggest expected earnings gainers and decliners in the sector:
Continue reading The week in preview: More hope for techs, doubt about financials
Posted Oct 10th 2008 9:19AM by Jim Cramer (RSS feed)
Filed under: Forecasts, Ford Motor (F), General Motors (GM), Market matters, Citigroup Inc. (C), AFLAC Inc (AFL), Bank of America (BAC), Chesapeake Energy (CHK), Colgate-Palmolive (CL), Comerica Inc (CMA), General Mills (GIS), Morgan Stanley (MS), Procter and Gamble (PG), , Freep't McMoRan Copper (FCX), Stocks to Buy, Cramer on BloggingStocks, Financial Crisis, MetLife Inc. (MET)
TheStreet.com's Jim Cramer says the safety theme will come back if only because these companies' earnings will be good in six months. Editor's note: Jim Cramer will present his 2009 stock outlook for the first time at TheStreet.com Investment Conference on Saturday, Oct. 25.
Click for details.
Now they come after the
Procter & Gambles (NYSE:
PG) (
Cramer's Take) and the
General Mills (NYSE:
GIS) (
Cramer's Take) and the like, betting that the action will be better in the cyclicals with all of this money being printed worldwide.
Commodities are also coming back because of reflation. And we have to feel that many of the infra and ag names are finally sold out by the hedge fund redemptions.
Here I am speaking of a
Freeport McMoRan (NYSE:
FCX) (
Cramer's Take), with its good yield and a belief that the hedge funds are at last done.
I don't buy it. I like a balanced portfolio, but I want to buy the GIS/PG all the way down because we are going into a recession, not going out of one. These companies pay dividends, raise dividends and have great commodity tailwinds.
Colgate's (NYSE:
CL) (
Cramer's Take) down a lot too, and I am liking that one.
Continue reading Cramer on BloggingStocks: Buy Procter, General Mills all the way down
Posted Jul 1st 2008 2:00PM by Steven Halpern (RSS feed)
Filed under: International markets, Newsletters, AFLAC Inc (AFL), Japan, Stocks to Buy
Aflac (NYSE: AFL) is a new addition to the "Borderless Portfolio" maintained by global expert John Christy. Here's the latest from his industry-leading Forbes International Investment Report.
"If you own a television, chances are you're quite familiar with the infamous squawking duck in Aflac's commercials. Aflac has also been in the news lately as the first American company to give shareholders a 'say on pay', or the ability to vote on executive compensation.
"Less well known, however, is Aflac's huge presence in the Japanese insurance market. In 2007, roughly
75% of the company's pre-tax operating earnings were generated in Japan.
"Alfac has been doing business in Japan for more than 30 years, and one in four Japanese households has an Aflac insurance policy. In Japan, Aflac sells healthcare policies for certain things that aren't covered by the national healthcare system, as well as life insurance. And, yes, they have a talking duck in their ads over there too.
"At a time when many financial companies are reporting massive write-offs, Aflac reiterated its target of 15% earnings growth this year, and double-digit growth in 2009. Aflac Japan is doing its part to help drive this growth with 19% operating earnings growth in the first quarter of 2008."
Each day, Steven Halpern's TheStockAdvisors.com offers the latest market commentary and favorite investment ideas from the nation's leading financial newsletter advisors.
Posted Jun 13th 2008 11:14AM by Eric Buscemi (RSS feed)
Filed under: Analyst reports, AFLAC Inc (AFL), Analyst initiations, Time Warner Cable (TWC)
MOST NOTEWORTHY: Drugstore.com, Sycamore and Aflac were today's noteworthy initiations:
- Kaufman Bros. believes Drugstore.com (NASDAQ: DSCM) is well-positioned for long-term growth and significant margin expansion, led by share gains in the OTC and prestige beauty verticals. The firm started shares with a Buy rating and $3.25 target.
- Merriman initiated Sycamore (NASDAQ: SCMR) with a Neutral rating and prefers to be on the sidelines given the company's concentrated customer base and lack of clarity on strategic priorities and ongoing business operations.
- SunTrust Robinson expects the Aflac's (NYSE: AFL) cancer insurance policies in Japan to benefit from concerns about the national health system. Shares were assumed with a Buy rating and $79 target.
OTHER INITIATIONS:
- Caris initiated Mylan (NYSE: MYL) with a Buy rating and $18 target.
- NetSuite (NYSE: N) was assumed with a Hold rating and $22 target at Deutsche Bank.
- Stanford initiated Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) with a Buy rating and $20 target.
Posted May 6th 2008 3:22PM by Eliza Popescu (RSS feed)
Filed under: AFLAC Inc (AFL), Options, Housing, Recession
Over the past year, we have been hearing a lot of bad news about investment banks and insurers. The slumping housing market, credit crunch and subprime mortgage troubles have been leading the headlines, so many of you are probably shying away from financial stocks as almost all the banks have been getting only bad publicity lately.
In the light of those worries about safe investments, CNNMoney is asking us to reconsider our opinions, claiming that there really are some quality stocks in these challenging financial times.
Berkshire Hathaway tops the list, mainly because of its CEO Warren Buffett, who has the experience of surviving previous recessions. While some investors may have impression that the company has a lot of tough times ahead, CNNMoney sees Berkshire with a lot of capital, which could be enough to steer it through the current economic storm. To support this argument, CNNMoney cites Keppler Asset management CIO Michael Keppler, who is convinced that Berkshire will be able to beat the difficult market.
Continue reading Berkshire Hathaway, Aflac and RBC among best financials, says CNNMoney
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