Tim likes a lot of the media stocks, especially News Corp. which he owns himself. With an election year coming up, he’s looking to advertising dollars that are going to be spent not just in television, but in places like MySpace as well. There’s a lot of intangibles with new media, and some of the big media companies are better-poised than others.
Question #3: Diego from Miami asks: given all the concerns about credit deterioration, why hasn’t Mastercard (MA) sold off while other companies like American Express (AXP) have?
Mastercard has only been public for a relatively short time, Jon says. He would recommend hanging onto MA stock because it still continues to outperform stocks like American Express. That being said, he wouldn’t buy it at this level.
Question #4: For a special celebrity Face2Face, NHL Hall of Famer Rod Gilbert, the New York Rangers’ all-time leading scorer, wants to know if the guys would recommend getting out of large industrial names like Caterpillar (CAT) or Honeywell (HON) with signs of the economy slowing and earnings just ahead.
The 2006 rally didn’t seem to affect CAT, Guy says, but a slowdown in the U.S. economy may not hurt the company because while the U.S. slows, China surges ahead, and CAT has great exposure in China’s mining industry. The stock has gotten a little ahead of itself at $67, but Guy thinks you could own it scaled down to $62. And Honeywell is a stock he’s loved for a long time. It has a $3 billion stock repurchasing plan on its 52-week high and it has even moved higher with new automotive and homeowner exposure, even as both those sectors remain awful, Guy says.
