By Ry Frank:

ConocoPhillips (COP), the sixth placed super major of oil and gas stocks behind Royal Dutch Shell (RDS.A), Exxon Mobil (XOM), Chevron (CVX), BP (BP), and Total (TOT) is revitalizing itself. The company is expanding its exploration capabilities in areas where known reserves are held, while at the same time, raising capital through the selling of assets in order to invest in future gains.

With a huge portion of assets in the U.S. and operations in 40 other countries, ConocoPhillips is raising the bar on how it conducts business. Observing the company’s management strategies is one reason why I firmly believe this company to be one to buy and keep buying as much as possible.

ConocoPhillips is beginning to show a livelier side. The company is shedding excess where needed and beefing up new and current projects, generating more revenue for future exploration. Delta Air Lines recently spent $150 million to

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By Dividend Kings:

CenturyLink (CTL), which is the fourth largest landline operator in the US, reported adjusted earnings per share for the first quarter of 2012 of $.68 per share, which was comfortably ahead of consensus estimates of $.59 per share.

However, adjusted earnings declined by just under 13% from $.78 a share for the same quarter in the previous year because of the increase in operating costs, as well as decline in revenues from legacy voice services. Even the adjusted earnings per share excludes the impact of special accounting items, such as non-cash amortization of intangible assets. However, it should be noted that revenues on a year-on-year basis were ‘doomed’ by over 170% to $4.6 billion, which was slightly ahead of the consensus estimate of $4.6 billion.

The revenues of the Markets Group fell by around 4% year-over-year to $2.2 billion; the slowdown in the legacy business was the principal cause. Business

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By Investment Underground:

by Darnell Brown

Google (GOOG) is the largest internet information provider in the world. The company is based in Mountain View, California and trades at around $623 per share with a market cap of $197 billion.

For years, when I thought about Google, I considered it to be just a search engine company. We now know that it much more than that. Google’s mission was “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. Google has lived up to its mission by providing search engine services, social networking services, email services, YouTube, Google Chrome OS browser services and, of course, its Android mobile operating system.

Google has been a consistently fast growing business since its inception. Google’s rapid earnings growth has driven the stock price, which is up by 525% since the initial public offering in August of 2004. Google has increased revenues and net income in

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By Income Hunter:

According to its first quarter 2012 earnings report, Kodiak Oil & Gas (KOG) brought in just under $80 million in total revenues in the first quarter, compared to $13.3 million in the first quarter of 2011. Oil made up 96% of revenues in the first quarter of 2012, or $77 million, which is reassuring given the current natural gas price environment.

Following its earnings report, Kodiak released an interim corporate update providing details for its drilling activities in the Williston Basin in North Dakota on the Middle Bakken and Three Forks formations, where most of the company’s acreage is held. A completed well on the Three Forks formation is producing an average of 1,454 boe per day and a completed well on the Middle Bakken is producing an average of 2,033 boe per day. In the same release, Kodiak indicated that two more wells on the Middle Bakken will be

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By Arsene Lupin:

The annual summer confabulation between billionaire hedge fund managers (aka the Ira Sohn Conference) is officially over. Interestingly, the blog coverage of this conference was much more prevalent this year, but a number of blogs were contradictory in their “notes” of what specific hedge fund managers said. Additionally (in comparison to years past), the fund manager recommendations were somewhat qualitative and somewhat contradictory (cf AAPL).

I’ve included the 2012 picks below, and the associated commentary from the more reliable Absolute Returns, as the stock universe we’ll talk about here. As you can see from this calculation of returns on 2011 Ira Sohn picks, the variance of performance in these picks can be astounding, even when compared to a volatile market. If you are to invest on the basis of Ira Sohn picks, it’s best to do more than push the ‘buy’ button. So, in this article, I share my grading

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strong>By The Dumb Money:

Background: I bought my first shares of Abbott (ABT) on April 13, 2010 at $52.44/share. As of Friday’s close the total return of ABT thus far has beaten the S&P Total Return Index, 26.5% to 13.02%. I added to my ABT holding once, on weakness, at $47.93/share on January 3, 2011, as my analysis at the time showed it was more than 20% undervalued. That portion of the investment has even more thoroughly trounced the S&P Total Return Index, thus far, returning a total return of 35.9% to 4.86%. This is primarily because in October 2011 Abbott announced it would spin off its pharmaceutical business, which investors (or more accurately, given their entry timing, speculators) appear to have cheered. This new company will be called AbbVie.

The question now is, what is ABT/AbbVie worth, and what are its business prospects? My conclusions are 1) Humira is the key to valuing

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By Jeff Williams:

Determining a company’s financial health is a very important step in making a decision whether or not to invest or to stay invested. There are many different ways to compute a company’s financial health. In this test, I will be taking into consideration Home Depot Incorporation’s (HD) profitability, debt and capital, and operating efficiency. Based on this criteria, we get to see sales, returns, margins, liabilities, assets, returns and turnovers.

Profitability

Profitability is a class of financial metrics that are used to assess a business’ ability to generate earnings as compared with expenses and other relevant costs incurred during a specific period of time.

In this section we will look at four tests of profitability. They are: Net income, operating cash flow, return on assets and quality of earnings. From these four metrics, we will establish if the company is making money and gauge the quality of the reported profits.

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By Stockmarketopedia:

If you feel the stock markets are approaching bottom and you are actively buying stocks, we do not want to tell our readers how to buy stocks but strongly suggest you take a look at Arcan Resources Ltd. (ARNBF.PK) as we feel it is a must buy oil stock.

This oil stock is a $250 million dollar market cap stock with a 90% light oil weighting. This oil stock has over 400 net horizontal locations in the Swan Hills area of Alberta with over 170 net sections of land. Arcan believes waterfloods can increase oil recovery factor to 40% or 400,000 bbls/well. The stock provides great exposure to light oil and tremendous upside, so if you are currently stock trading the North American stock markets, we strongly suggest you take a look at this stock.

Haywood Securities Inc. has a target price of $8.25 for this hot oil stock which

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By Jiang Zhang:

In my May 12th note titled Baidu’s Entry-Level Device Hits The Sweet Spot, But Challenges Remain I pointed out that Baidu’s (BIDU) 1000-yuan smartphone allows the company to:

1. Penetrate China’s fast growing entry-level smartphone market
2. Establish brand recognition and pave the way for a future push into the high-end segment
3. Solidify industry leadership in mobile search.

However, Baidu’s entry-level smartphone is unlikely to have a meaningful contribution to Baidu’s mobile ambition unless the company:

1. Educates consumers in the advantages of Baidu Yi compared to the other Android forks
2. Develops a robust app library and large developer base
3. Attracts talented senior and mid-level managers who have relevant expertise and experience in the mobile OS space.

In my view, Baidu will likely face cost pressure if the company is serious about gaining a significant share in China’s crowded mobile OS market through mass marketing, R&D and key personnel hiring.

Lack Of Significant

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By Jacob Steinberg:

Lately some good news regarding Nokia (NOK) came from China, however we failed to see this news in American media. Michel van der Bel, COO of the Greater China Region for Microsoft (MSFT) recently announced that Windows phones reached a market share of 7% in the country where Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone only enjoys a market share of 6%. Considering that Nokia’s Lumia was launched in China very recently – less than a full quarter – this looks and smells like success to me. Similar news also came from Russia. Additionally, the phones reached a market share of 6% in Germany. Outside of the U.S., Nokia still has a great brand name and the company is still recognized as one of the best mobile phone companies in the world.

China is a huge market with a growing middle class, and Nokia’s success in China will translate into the company’s turnaround. As

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