Uber is an attractive growth investment opportunity and recently received backing by Bill Ackman By Blue Chip Portfolios Shares of Uber Technologies, Inc (UBER, Financial) have proved a disappointing investment over the past year. Uber shares have delivered a total return of roughly 4% while the S&P 500 has delivered a total return of roughly 22% over the same time period. While the company has delivered solid results including impressive revenue growth and significant margin improvement, investors have become skeptical of the long-term prospects of the company due to the threat of autonomous vehicles. However, I believe the company is…

Many small business owners plan on retiring over the next several years but have 80% of their wealth tied up in their companies. We discuss with Jonathan Kruger of Rothschild Wealth Partners in Chicago about the ways to unwind this concentrated wealth position. Larry Light: Why is diversification such an essential topic for small business owners? Jonathan Kruger: Diversification is vital because most small business owners have a concentrated position. They’ve spent years, sometimes decades, building their business, and often, up to 80% of their wealth is tied up in that single asset. While their business may thrive now, relying…

Q4 Earnings Update The majority of the fourth quarter 2024 earnings season is now behind us with about three-fourths of large-cap, two-thirds of mid-cap, and half of small-cap companies having reported. So far, while the stock market has seen some volatility with certain individual stocks, the overall reporting period has been relatively standard. As shown on Figure 1 below, revenues grew by mid-single digits and earnings grew by double digits for the companies that are profitable and have reported. This was a bit better than expectations entering earnings season, but not necessarily an outsized beat. Figure 1: Median Q4 Results…

Key News Asian equities and currencies were mixed overnight as South Korea and Mainland China outperformed while Indonesia underperformed with President Donald Trump’s tariff threat weighing on sentiment. It is hard to say if Trump’s tariff threat, the recent strong outperformance, or xAI’s Grok3 model launch sparked today’s Hong Kong growth/internet stock profit-taking. The timing is interesting, with Alibaba, NetEase, and Bilibili reporting earnings tomorrow, as all three have an AI angle. Mainland China and Hong Kong hard technology stocks in the semiconductor and high-end manufacturing sectors, specifically in auto/electric vehicle, hardware, and electric equipment, had a strong day. People…

Bonds (and bond proxies) are hated right now. That’s our shot at big dividends—because mainstream investors’ thinking here is totally backward. We’re going to pounce, and use this opportunity to grab ourselves a huge 7.6% payout sporting an unusual “discount in disguise.” Tariffs: Don’t Believe the Hype The reason for this opportunity comes back to tariffs—which I admit, dear reader, I’ve heard so much about that I’m starting to dream about them at night! The badly flawed logic most people are applying to tariffs is this: Tariffs will drive up prices, adding to an inflation rate that, according to last…

How two Chinese women turned their Ph.D. theses into machine learning that makes connections between seemingly unrelated events to discover emerging fraud schemes. By Hank Tucker, Forbes Staff Back in 2006, after earning her Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon, Yinglian Xie wasn’t thinking about whether she wanted to make her career in the U.S. or her native China, let alone about someday being an entrepreneur. Instead, she was laser focused on the best place to continue her work–her thesis was on identifying potential internet security threats by looking for correlations between seemingly unrelated events. She ended up at Microsoft Research’s Silicon…

Value stocks have had a difficult time over the last few years, but things could be looking up, especially for investors who seek out lesser-known names. In recent interviews with me, Jim Zimmerman, Abigail Zimmerman, and Ara Laterovian with Lowell Capital, and Ted Rosenthal with TMR Capital each shared their two top under-the-radar stock picks. Lowell Capital chose Macfarlane Group and Academy Sports and Outdoors, while Rosenthal selected REV Group and Celestica. Macfarlane Group Macfarlane Group is the leading specialist distributor of protective packaging materials in the U.K. It operates in the U.K., Ireland, the Netherlands and Germany, providing industrial…

Typically voting is thought of as a highly personal decision and practice. And yet, in the world of public markets, most investors that take the time to vote their proxies tend to actually outsource these decisions, or at least, the research behind them, to just two companies: Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) and Glass Lewis. According to the Wall Street Journal, they have cornered approximately 97% of the proxy voting market, giving them the power to sway voting by as much as 30%. Translating this into electoral politics, it’s as if two companies controlled the electoral college votes for all seven…

There has been extensive discussion about the tariffs the Trump administration wants to impose on U.S. trading partners. Much of this discussion remains inconclusive regarding the specific amounts, timing, affected countries, and the particular goods that would be subject to these tariffs. However, one proposal that appears certain is a 25% tariff on steel scheduled to take effect on March 12. For the most part, tariffs function as taxes paid by U.S. importers rather than by exporters in foreign countries. This means that a tariff is a tax, transferring wealth from local consumers (essentially everyone, since steel is widely used)…

Kraft Heinz has been named as the ‘’Top Dividend Stock of the Nasdaq 100’’, according to Dividend Channel, which published its most recent ”DividendRank” report. The report noted that among the components of the Nasdaq 100 index, KHC shares displayed both attractive valuation metrics and strong profitability metrics. For example, the recent KHC share price of $28.92 represents a price-to-book ratio of 0.7 and an annual dividend yield of 5.5% — by comparison, the average dividend paying stock in the Nasdaq 100 yields 1.8% and trades at a price-to-book ratio of 9.6. The report also cited the strong quarterly dividend…