Zacks best trade

By Joseph.L.Shaefer Seeking Alpha Summary Most science and technology funds are passively-managed and capitalization-weighted. All have done exceedingly well this year as the biggest of the big continue to gobble market share. At what point do some governments may decide these monsters are too big for their pantalones and restrain them or tax them into unprofitability? Here’s an interesting adjunct to ETF homogeneity that may fly under the political radar. We used to think of tech stocks as those engaged in science and technology that would likely change the way we live, defend our nation, build things, transport ourselves, secure resources, and so on. Somewhere along the way the “science” part got moved into the sectors with which they deal – aerospace firms into the Industrials sector, those pursuing interesting avenues in alternative energy into the Energy Sector, new hardware for medical diagnostics into the Health Sector, etc. What Big Tech is now is mostly produc...

By Brian Gilmartin Seeking alpha Summary The network giant reports Wednesday night after the close. Cisco needs to generate revenue growth eventually. The Dividend yield at 3.6% will attract yield fans, BUT dividend dollars as % of free-cash-flow now over 60%. Did Cisco not have an incentive stock options last quarter? Cisco Systems ( CSCO ), the networking giant and one of the mom-mo names of the late 1990's that created tremendous value for shareholders, will report their fiscal Q4 '17 earnings after the bell Wednesday night, August 16, 2017.  Analyst consensus is expecting a little over $12 bl in revenue which is expected to generate $0.61 in earnings per share for year-over-year declines of -5% and -3% respectively.  And therein lies the tale of Cisco: all those supposed bolt-on acquisitions, paid for with the incentive stock option crack, that - as Mr. Buffett puts it so succinctly - is a perfect example of "buying high and selling low" all of ...

By Jerry Wagner    Seeking alpha Reading Edward Thorp's 1967 book "Beat the Market" in the summer of 1968 changed my life. I had picked the book up as a summer read while home from college. I was intrigued. Years before, I had read a Life magazine account of how Professor Thorp had created the system to beat the dealer at the game of blackjack, or twenty-one. The method outlined by Thorp in "Beat the Market" used arbitrage (simultaneously buying one asset while selling short another to realize the difference) with stock warrants (rights often issued with stock to make it more attractive to investors by giving the opportunity to gain more shares at a later time at a fixed price). It turned out that these warrants were often overpriced, and if one sold them short while buying the underlying stock, you could create a "can't lose" trade that made money whether stocks advanced or declined. Included in the index was a valuation formula that allo...