Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway rallied above the broader market in 2013. TheStreet.com takes a look at five choice positions in the portfolio.
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2013 is turning out to be a pretty good year for Warren Buffett. Year-to-date, the octogenarian billionaire has seen his firm, Berkshire Hathaway, rally more than 25.6 percent. That's almost double the returns that investors have gotten from the broad market over that same period.
And a lot of that upside in Berkshire's price has to do with Buffett's $85 billion stock portfolio.
Cloud-computing stocks have been active recently, and yesterday the bulls turned to data-warehousing company Teradata.
OptionMonster's tracking systems detected an early volume spike in the June 60 calls, with large blocks crossing for $0.80 and $0.85. Those contracts lock in the price where the stock can be purchased, which can result in some nice leverage in the event of a rally.
You know it's been a crazy month for stocks when yesterday's 0.07 percent decline in the S&P 500 was one of the four biggest down days in May.
I, for one, don't necessarily think that's a bad thing. As breakneck as the market's pace has been this month, this rally has been nothing if not orderly—I've been saying that since the S&P's uptrend started back in November. This week, as the broad market peeks up into overbought territory for the second time in this rally window, I think we're due for a correction. Just not necessarily a downward one.
Energy producer Apache bounced at its 200-day moving average, and the bulls are looking for steady gains.
OptionMonster's tracking programs detected the purchase of 10,000 January 90 calls for $3.51 and the sale of an equal number of January 100 calls for $1.36. Volume was more than quadruple open interest at each strike, indicating new activity.
Owning calls locks in the price where investors can buy shares, while selling them fixes a maximum exit level. Combining the two strategies lets them control the spread between two prices at low cost.
Google is in increasing competition with the main computing ecosystem players. Among the biggest fights Google is engaging, are the following three:
1.Apple: Google needs to out-gun Apple in mobile computing—smartphones and tablets.
2.Microsoft: Google needs to out-gun Microsoft in traditional PCs and gaming.
3. Facebook: Google needs to become the main alternative to Facebook in social networking.
In the last few days, it appears that Google's weapon of choice to fight these three battles may be Nvidia. Let me tell you why:
Yahoo's groundbreaking acquisition of blogging website Tumblr makes sense, CNBC's Jim Cramer said Monday on "Squawk on the Street," and many in the market may not be young enough to realize it.
"People who are devoid of a blog, they go on Tumblr," Cramer said. "Social media is underrated by people who are older than 23."
Despite a lack of significant earnings from Tumblr, over time several acquisitions of this nature have paid off, such as Google buying YouTube or Facebook's purchase of Instagram.
Energy pipelines have been a favorite of the bulls, and now they're looking for Kinder Morgan to break out.
OptionMonster's monitoring systems detected the purchase of more than 5,700 December 45 calls on Friday, most of which priced for $0.48 and $0.49. The volume was more than more than five times the previous open interest at the strike, indicating that new positions were initiated.
The calls lock in the price where shares can be bought in the energy-transportation company. Because of their cheap entry price, the contracts can generate significant leverage if the stock keeps climbing, but limits the amount of money that can be lost if it drops.
One of the biggest secular trends in technology is toward cloud computing, which allows consumers and businesses to access data and applications anywhere, anytime.
"You have to focus on cloud as a tech investor at this point," Ken Allen, technology portfolio manager at T. Rowe Price, told CNBC this week. "It cuts across the industry, across subsectors."
Given cloud computing's potential, Wall Street analysts remain bullish on two of the companies at the forefront of this movement: Google and Amazon.
Google's announcement of its music streaming service, Google Play Music All Access, had much fanfare going into it. After the announcement, it seems Google dropped the ball with this.
At its I/O developer conference, Google's Chris Yerga unveiled the subscription service to take on the likes of Spotify, Rdio and to a lesser extent, Pandora Media.
By pricing the service at $9.99 per month and not having an ad-supported model, Spotify, Pandora and others have little to fear. The ad-supported model has allowed Spotify to grow to over 24 million users, with over 6 million of those paying for the service. Yes, Google's "Listen Now" feature, which can suggest music to you based on your history, and allows you to combine your purchased music with the radio feed, is nice. But the short-sightedness to attack Spotify, Pandora and others where Google knows best (targeted ads), seems like a curious decision, and perhaps a mistake.
The blurring of the line between what you watch on TV and what you stream over the Internet continues to get hazier. This morning, more proof that the watching of television is quickly changing.
Amazon wants to be your primary entertainment provider and toward that end, signed an exclusive deal with Comcast's NBC/Universal to stream its shows on the Seattle-based online retailer's Amazon Prime Instant Video service.
Amazon will be the only service able to stream five Universal programs from previous seasons—"Suits", "Grimm", "Covert Affairs", "Smash", "Alphas," and later this year, the popular series "Hannibal."
