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Host Hotels and Resorts is poised for a decent run upwards over the next few months I believe. Between the months of May and July, the stock dropped from a high of $18.76 all the way down to $11.14, a drop of 40.6%. Ouch! Ever since that low, the stock has risen back up to it’s current price of $14.27. This is a gain of 28.1%. I think that the stock is on it’s way back up to at least $18/share before the end of the year. This would give it a gain of 26.1% from today’s price.

I have come up with this price target purely by doing a quick technical analysis of the stock’s chart. Take a look at the chart below to see how it has fared over the past three months.

Based on my calculations, the slope of this positive sloping trendline is about +$1.76/month. Remember though that this is a fairly arbitrary line that was chosen based upon my opinion of the chart. I believe that this line does represent a fairly accurate view of how the stock has moved over the past few months. Even more encouraging is that it has continued to fare well, even as the market has been very shaky over the past few months.

Based on a slope of +$1.76/month, I believe that the stock should be well situated in the $18s by November.

One should take note though of a strong patch of resistance between $17.25 and $17.50. As you can see in the chart below, the stock struggled to make it through the elusive $17.50 mark as it traded in a narrow band between $16.00 and $17.50 for about four months between the beginning of January through the end of April.

You will notice at the end of May HST ended its’ short lived one-month above $17.50. As soon as it dropped below this mark, the stock tanked and dropped all the way down to $11.14/share in a little over a month.

I think that the stock will have an easy run up to the $17.50 range and then stagnate for a little while. I would either sell at this point or put a trailing stop loss order on the stock with a roughly $1.50 trail to lock in your profits.

If you get in before 9/30/2008, you will also be eligible for the $.20/share dividend. That puts the current yield at abot 5.6%. That beats any certificate or money market account these days

Crystal Research, and independent research company has just issued a 64-page research report on Generex Biotechnology. Crystal Research “is an independent research service company dedicated to increasing the visibility of innovative and growing private and public companies that represent extraordinary investment opportunities. Regardless of the size of the client, our independent research and advisory services provide additional value and assistance in realizing a company’s goals, enabling it to achieve its fullest potential.”

They focus on companies with “solid growth prospects, well-designed operating and growth strategies, an experienced and proven management team, command of a niche position in a large and expanding market, and a unique or innovative position or technology.”

After looking at some of the other companies that Crystal Research has covered, it appears that they mainly cover smaller BioTech companies.

This research report is free for anyone who wants to read it. You can access this report here.

In the review, they mention many things that are in Generex’s favor. There are currently 246 million people with diabetes worldwide. They also mention that diabetes is the 4th leading cause of death in the world. Since Generex’s product targets diabetes victims, this provides an excellent potential customer base for them.

American Medical Alert Corporation (AMAC) had issued a press release stating that they are predicting the gross revenues will increase to $39,200,000. This is a 10% increase from FY 2007. They have also predicted a growth in net earnings of 25% from last year. Additionally, their net earnings growth over the past three years is 104% if everything goes as projected.

This good news coincides with the release of a new product by the company. In Q4 of 2008 the company hopes to release a medication management and dispensing product called MedSmart. The company is also expecting to be receiving awards for its TBCS (Telephony Based Communication Services) in the second half of 2008.

For more details on this article, you can read it in its’ entirety at marketwatch.com.

For more information on AMAC, click here.

Their stock is presently trading at $6.41/share, which is down 34.9% from its’ 52-week high (10/31/2007) and up 25.9% from its’ 52-week low (3/17/2008).

As a side note, I presently hold stock in this company.

Every so often I will get something in the mail from “The Natural Contrarian.” I like to hang on to them for a while just to see how their picks really work out. It is a good way to try and test out the true track record of an investment company. I would think that in order to show how great at picking stocks they are, they would send a free recommendation for a surefire winner. This would convince people that they knew what they were doing and would entice them to do some investing with them.

Most recently (Oct 2007) it was a pamphlet touting their latest “hall of fame” pick. Inside this eight page color pamphlet was a lot of information on this up and coming company. The top line of the pamphlet proclaimed, “Expect +10,000% profits if you hold FXPE” (the ticker has recently changed to FXPT) “at least 6 months.” The reason that this large price run-up was expected was because Fox Petroleum was said to have access to “160 million barrels of oil along Alaska’s North Slope.”

Since I received this recommendation, FXPT has been in constant free fall. The flyer claimed that FXPT would reach $55/share, but in reality is has come nowhere even close. On April 21st, 2008, the stock did a 1 for 5 split in order to boost their price. On a split adjusted basis, the stock was trading at approximately $12/share, but it was actually at $2.40/share when the recommendation was made. It is currently trading at $1.52, or $.304 in October 2007 prices. This is a total decrease in price of 87.33%. So much for the massive gains they were expecting.

This example just goes to show that you shouldn’t blindly follow someone’s advice even if they claim that it is a surefire winner. One should always do their due diligence before investing.

Yesterday I stumbled across this website somehow or another. I’m not totally sure. Anyway, what I found was a very useful and informative site. Ever wonder what mutual fund companies own your particular stock. Better yet, what stocks does a particular mutual fund hold? At MFFAIS you can find that all out from their wealth of information.

Here is how it works:

You search the name or symbol of any stock or mutual fund that you want to look at. It doesn’t seem like this search option has been perfected yet, because I had some troubles finding a stock using the search tool. The best way to find what you are looking for is by starting letter. If you are looking at a stock, it will show you all the mutual funds that are currently invested or recently sold out. It also shows the number of shares that they own and what those shares are worth. You could also click on a mutual fund and it would show you all of the funds current holdings and recent sells. It then shows the number of shares in each company that fund holds.

You can also find out some interesting information on the site’s home page. For example, the top mutual fund class right now is the Global small/mid cap growth class. It also shows that Philip Morris was recently added to 230 different funds.

While I wouldn’t base my trading decisions on what this site says, it is interesting to see what the professionals are doing. If picking stocks is what they do every day for a living, I would think that their choices would likely be a bit better than mine. Just a guess. Although it is nice to see that some funds are doing worse than me this year. According to the site, the worst performing fund is Fursa Alternative Strategies LLC.

I was looking through the JSDA 2007 Annual Report, and I found something interesting on page F-24 (the last page in the report). According to this page, 2007 sales in the United States were 33,949,000. It also stated that sales in Canada were $5,393,000 for 2007.

According to Wikipedia, the United States has a population of 304,618,000 and Canada has a population of 33,320,300. You can find these statistics here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cou…

Using this data, we can find that the per capita sales of JSDA in the United States were 11.14 cents. In Canada, the per capita sales of JSDA were 16.19 cents.

I find it interesting that a company that is based in the US would have per capita sales in Canada that are 45.33% higher than their home operating country.

The greater Vancouver BC area does have a population of 2,249,725 ( http://www.bcstats.gov.bc.ca/data/pop/po… This represents 6.75% of Canada’s population. It is possible that JSDA is doing the majority of their selling here since it is so close to Seattle.

As a comparison, the largest metropolitan statistical area in the United States is New York City with 18,815,988 people ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Stat… This represents about 6.18% of the total US population.

Anyway, I thought this was some pretty interesting information that I hadn’t seem brought up on these boards before. It would be interesting to hear what sort of explanations other people have for this.

About a month ago, I wrote a post about the best dividend paying stocks in the market at the time. The date for that post was June 16th, 2008. Since then, it can be seen that all of these stocks performed poorly during a period where the DJIA only dropped 5.9%. While that is a fairly large drop, most of these high dividend paying stocks have fallen by much more over this time period.

Take a look at the spreadsheet below to see how these companies have fared over the last month. Use the -5.9% to benchmark against the market.

In this spreadsheet, you will notice that GLS (Genesis Lease Limited) has been the only one with a price increase during this period, but this is only due to a recent run up in price over the past few days. Otherwise, this stock has been in decline ever since its high of $28.35 in June of 2007. The only other company to beat the Dow was CMO (Capstead Mortgage Company).

One other interesting thing of note is that the dividend yield increased on all companies except for the ones that cut them completely. The reason for this is because of the decrease in price. As the price drops, the project dividend yield increases as the price drops. It is easy to see that the dividend has risen on the majority of these stocks, but at the cost of the stock price

After 5 years of having an account with RBC Dain Rauscher, I have finally closed it out. I realized that at this point in time having a full service broker wasn’t right for me. I first opened the account when I was 18 because I wanted to invest in some stock. The first and only stock transaction I did with them was purchase 20 shares of Microsoft. I was pretty excited when I made the trade, but that soon changed when I found out what the trading commission for it was. It cost about $65 to make the trade. When you factor that out, you find that the stock will have to rise $6-$7 before you make any money. That made me pretty upset, but I didn’t sell because then I would have eaten $130. So I hung onto it ever since.

I got really excited when they paid their one-time $3 dividend. I was mostly excited because the dividend ($3 x 20 = $60) was almost enough to cover my commission to purchase the stock. I never really paid a whole lot of attention to the account because there was just one stock in it. A year or so later I was looking at a statement that came in the mail. When I looked at it I noticed that there was nothing in the cash account. I knew that there should have been at least $60 in there plus a smattering of small dividends plus a bit of interest from the cash account. This was a bit upsetting to say the least. The next day I called in to talk to “my broker.” Of course the broker was not available, so I end up getting passed around from secretary to secretary and finally end up with someone who sounded like they hadn’t worked there too long. I told her what happened and she said that she would look into it and give me a call back.

After about three days of playing phone tag during my lunch I finally found out what had happened. Apparently if you do not have over $100,000 in your account you are charged a $100 annual maintenance fee. When you have only ~$500 in your account that comes out to be a 20% deduction. She did seem excited to tell me though that since I only had ~$70 in cash assets in the account they only charged me that and wrote off the rest. How nice of them.

After this incident I decided to close out my account and transfer it to Fidelity. For some reason I got charged $112.98 for the transfer. I guess that is the closing fees associated with closing out an account. That seems kind of ridiculous for transferring 20 shares of stock. Between the $65 purchase price, the $112.98 close out fee and the $20 sale price, I am going to have to sell Microsoft for $9.90 more than what I bought it for to break even.

I guess there are a few lessons to be learned from this:

1. High priced full service brokers only make sense if you have a ton of money
2. If you are doing all the research to buy and sell stocks, you shouldn’t be paying a premium to do it.
3. Know the fee structure of a full service broker before you get into one. Otherwise the fees will eat you alive.

Overall I think it was a decent learning experience. Buying that first 20 shares is what really got me interested in trading. I don’t think that I would be as active into my trading today if I hadn’t started out this way. Although it may look like a wasted $270, but in the end I learned a lot about how these companies work. If you have a lot of money and just want someone to do all the work for you, a full service broker may be right for you. If you are just starting out and don’t mind doing a bit of research, then a low priced broker like Fidelity, Scottrade or Schwab would likely be the better option.

I recently went to the Fidelity home page and was welcomed by the news that they had created a new mutual fund. The name of the fund is the Fidelity Emerging Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) Fund. The fund focuses on “the region of emerging economies from Russia through Eastern Europe and the Middle East and the entire African continent.”

Countries in the EMEA region could be seen to be highly risky because of the possibility of instability within the region. A major reason though that this area could potentially become profitable is because the “region is rich with natural resources which are in high demand in fast expanding economies. The region benefits from strong oil reserves, industrial metals, and precious metals.”

Countries in this region could potentially stand to have the largest percentage gains in their respective economies in comparson to the rest of the world. Traditionally, the EMEA region has “had low correlation to US and Developed (Europe, Australia and Far East) markets, as well as low inter-market correlation.”

As of 5/30/08 the fund had a NAV of $10.10 with an expense ratio of 1.42%. The average expense ratio for emerging market funds is 1.77%. This fund has been open since 5/8/09. To invest in this fund through Fidelity, one needs an initial deposit of $2500 and maintain a minimum balance of $2000. To find out more about this fund, click here. You can also find a quote for this fund from any financial website by using the symbol FEMEX.

A recent article in the Seattle P-I written by Andrea James reports that Starbucks has announced that they are going to start selling smoothies in their coffee shops. “In April, Seattle-based Starbucks Corp. said that it hopes to expand its customer base by serving blended fruit and protein beverages, energy drinks and healthy foods.” While this may seem to be a deviation from their current business plan, it may be interesting to note that “Jamba Juice got its start with the help of Starbucks Chief Executive Howard Schultz, who was an original investor and had served as board member of the company.” To date, Jamba Juice has grown to over 700 stores.

Although Schultz helped to start Jamba Juice, I don’t really see how smoothies fit in with his remake of the company. It always seemed to me that Shultz’s goal was to bring Starbucks back to the vibe it had 15 years ago when it was still a smaller company trying to make it big. He got rid of the delicious breakfast sandwiches because they were overpowering the aroma of the coffee. It would seem like each individual Starbucks would need a lot more room in order to accommodate a smoothie bar as well. Wouldn’t this also take away from the romance and niche of the coffee bar? I guess we will see.