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Three points about today’s trading:
1) Financials again down on weak earnings from European banks like Societe Generale and Credit Agricole; and Oppenheimer’s Meredith Whitney continuing to take down 2008 and 2009 estimates on brokers.
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2) Bulls hoping that strengthening in the dollar would lead to a decline in commodity prices are again having a hard time arguing their point today. Once again, we have modest strength in the dollar and while industrial metals are a tad weaker, energy commodities are rallying.
Credit Suisse attempted to explain this in a note this morning, by pointing out that:
a) commodities have risen 40% of the time when the dollar has strengthened; and
b) industrial commodity prices normally only fall significantly when global Industrial Production is below 2 percent year over year, compared to 4 percent now.
3) All those people arguing that the EDS/Hewlett-Packard deal would be a big challenge to IBM are missing the point: IBM is way, way ahead of even a combined entity.
IBM recognized very early the recognizing the competitive advantage associated with selling a bundled solution--software, hardware, services, financing, all together.
To compete effectively in global services, you need scale -- IBM has it, Hewlett and EDS don’t. That’s why they needed to do this deal.
How far off are they? Here's the total service revenues for the three companies:
IBM [IBM
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]: $54 billion
EDS [EDS
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]: $22 billion
Hewlett [HPQ
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]: $17 billion
Bottom line: even merging the two, they are not even close to exceeding IBM's service revenues.
IBM is at a 6 year high today.
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