Tag Archives: Barron’s
Ad sales up at the Wall Street Journal, Barron's
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Dow Jones reported strong growth in ad sales at its business publications in February.
Here is an excerpt from the release: “Advertising linage at The Wall Street Journal, including Weekend Edition increased 18.6% in February due to increases in classified, general and financial advertising, partially offset by a decrease in technology advertising. In the classified advertising category at the Journal, February linage increased 31.8% due to an increase in real estate and other classified advertising. The Journal’s general advertising category increased 21.1% due to increases in industrial equipment, auto, insurance and other consumer advertising, partially offset by declines in professional services and pharmaceutical advertising. Linage in the Journal’s financial advertising category increased 12.8% primarily due to gains in tombstone advertising, partially offset by declines in wholesale advertising. The Journal’s technology advertising declined 7.9% due to weak hardware, software and personal computer advertising, partially offset by gains in communications and consumer electronics advertising.
“At Barron’s, total national advertising pages were up 21.9% in February primarily due to gains in general and financial advertising.
“Internationally, The Wall Street Journal Europe’s linage increased 18.8% due to increases in financial, technology and classified advertising, partially offset by a decline in general advertising. The Wall Street Journal Asia’s linage increased 10.8% in February due to increases in financial and classified advertising, partially offset by declines in general and technology advertising.”
Read the full release here.
Barron's online editor: Financial journalism moving online
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Howard Gold is leaving Barron’s Online after editing the Internet version of the financial publication for nearly a decade. In his farewell column, Gold revisits six predictions he made in 1998 about the Internet revolutionizing the media landscape, notes The Media Stock Blog.
Here are a couple of them, courtesy of Media Stock Blog, since Barron’s Online requires a subscription.
1. “Within a decade,” I wrote, “the Internet will become the primary means of getting financial information.”
The numbers of people visiting the big personal finance websites — roughly 10 million unique users per month each for Yahoo Finance and MSN Money, eight million for AOL Finance, according to Nielsen Net Ratings — far eclipse the numbers who get financial information from newspapers, magazines, newsletters and financial television shows.
5. “News is already a commodity online, but original analysis isn’t.”
With so much good information available free, it’s still difficult to get people’s attention — or their money. But we may be at an inflection point: The 750,000-plus subscribers of the Online Journal, the initial success of the New York Times’s paid TimesSelect and our own strong debut as a separately paid site (with more than 50,000 subscribers in the first month) may mean people finally are ready to pay for “the original insights and ideas provided by the best sites and news organizations,” as I wrote back then.
Read the rest of the Media Stock Blog’s analysis of his predictions here, including a discussion on the importance of blogs in financial journalism.
Criticizing the Barron's piece on Google
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The Internet chat rooms focused on stocks have been lit up this week about the drop in Google’s stock price, which began with a critical piece in the most-recent issue of Barron’s.
Now, others in the financial press are jumping into the fray, questioning why the story was written.
Andrew Feinberg, who writes a blog on the Kiplinger Personal Finance site called “The Money Monster,” criticized the reporting tactics in the article.
Feinberg writes, “I love Barron’s. It’s made me a ton of money, and I think its journalistic standards are high — most of the time. But, for reasons I cannot fathom, it sometimes does a hatchet job that proves embarrassing. (Hey, every week it lets Alan Abelson eviscerate the overall market, despite a track record that would embarrass a stopped clock.) This weekend it went after Google (GOOG).
“Virtually everything in the story, which says that the stock could be cut in half, may well have been true or at least not false, but the piece was unfair because it quoted not a single one of the many great investors who believe in the stock and because it assumed — wrongly in my view — that Google’s hefty spending on infrastructure and genius software mavens will never amount to anything but a drain on the corporate treasury. Google’s runaway spending disturbs me, but it doesn’t scare me away because almost every product the company introduces is terrific. (Barron’s neglected to mention any products other than search. Guess it was an oversight.) Barron’s also failed to mention that users love Google and don’t like Microsoft (MSFT) and that therein might lie an enormous long-term opportunity for Google.
“Instead, Barron’s quoted Stifel Nicolaus analyst Scott Devitt — who missed Google’s run-up completely — and Scott Kessler, S&P’s bearish Google-watcher. And the very bright Fred Hickey, who usually hates almost everything tech, including Google. Oh, and another source is Henry Blodget, the disgraced Merrill Lynch tech analyst. Yes, the piece did cite ultra-bull Mark Stahlman, but the bearish voices overwhelmed his.
“The piece reminded me of Barron’s cover-story hit on Kmart a few years ago. That piece focused solely on Kmart as a retailer — it never mentioned real estate or discussed the investing attributes of its legendary chairman Eddie Lampert — and it said the stock was toast. After a brief decline as a result of the piece, Kmart’s shares quickly doubled. The Kmart story is the most incompetent, biased piece Barron’s has ever done, I think. The Google story isn’t that bad. But it does do a disservice to the company and to any investors who bail out because of it.”
Read the entire posting here.
Magazine covers as investment tools
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Barry Ritholtz, who is president of a money manager in New York and writes a blog called “The Big Picture,” has an interesting comment today about using the covers of major magazines as indicators of how to invest.
Ritholtz notes that there are 56 covers of major magazines with Apple’s Steve Jobs on the front. Writes Ritholtz, “So the key question for afficianados of the magazine cover indicator is simply this: Which cover was your sell signal?
“The collage above shows why the cover indicator is not really applicable to single companies . . . ”
Ritholtz argues that the magazine cover indicator is more applicable for trends, such as the stock market, or the boom in industries like the Internet or nano-technology. He states, “In my experience, the Cover Indicator is useful for determining when large social phenomena are reaching an emotional crescendo. Oftentimes, emotions take over at the extremes, as things become either giddy or bleak.”
To give you a sample of how bad the predictions have been, here are a few examples:
1. BusinessWeek’s Nov. 2, 1968 cover called “The Boom that Just Won’t Stop” came out when the Dow was at 975. By the middle of 1970, the Dow was at 660.
2. The Barron’s dated Jan. 8, 1973 had the headline “1,200 on the Dow” when the index was at 1020. By the end of 1974, the Dow had dropped to below 600.
3. Then there is BusinessWeek’s infamous Aug. 13, 1979 cover called “The Death of Equities,” which came out when the Dow was at about 800. We all know what happened to the Dow in the next two decades.
5. After the crash, U.S. News & World Report’s Nov. 9, 1987 cover was titled “How to Ride out the Bull Market.” The Dow was at 2,000, and would rise to 11,000 in the next 14 years.
6. BusinessWeek’s Dec. 24, 1990 cover title was “The New Face of Recession.” The country was about to enter the longest time period of economic prosperity it has ever seen.
The point here is that the business media have been incredibly bad in predicting the economy and the stock market. There are lots of investors out there who look at covers such as these and do the opposite with their money.