| Monday Nov 14, 2005 Fear and Greed Issue #691 By Andrew Snyder
Twelve times more profitable than owning Apple at the beginning of the iPod craze... If you had bought Apple at $10.45 last October before the iPod took off and held until today, you'd be sitting on 410% gains! That's chump change. These 3 stocks are poised to hand you 14.34 times Apple's home-run performance. A buy now virtually locks in gains as early as November 22 or your money back - guaranteed. http://www.agora-inc.com/reports/TRZ/WTRZFA32/ Hot off the wire… You enemies of the oil industry are not going to be happy about this one. Just when many people are calling for large oil refineries to pay more taxes, it looks like many of them are paying less. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, nearly 25% of the nation’s refineries are actually paying less in taxes this year than they did last year. Yet, for many, this is the best year on record. One of the companies profiled in the report was Royal Dutch Shell. Its tax rate fell to 37% this year from the 41% it reported last year. At first glance those four percentage points don’t sound like too much, but when I did the math, I was astounded. During the third quarter, Shell had income of US$16.62 billion. At a tax rate of 41%, the company would have cut a check to the government for US$6.8 billion. But at a rate of 37%, that number drops by US$65 million dollars, or over a quarter of what the federal government has set aside to help needy folks pay their heating bills this winter. But big oil companies are not the only ones skirting the taxman. In fact, some of the folks that created those tax laws are taking advantage of their loopholes. I recently saw a report that shows the politically-heavy Kennedy family has handed over half a billion dollars from generation to generation, but has only ever paid US$134,000, or about one third of a percent of it, in estate taxes. When our legislators recently called a few big of the big oil executives to Capital Hill, they might not have been discussing the industry’s huge profits. Maybe the senators were a bit jealous and wanted to trade tax-evasion strategies. Crunching the numbers… It’s going to be a big week for Econo-Data. On top of the regular weekly data, we will also see the latest producer price index, the empire state index, the consumer price index, and the October housing start figure. But we’ll have to wait a day to start seeing the numbers. Today, there is nothing on the schedule. But we do have some action from the oil market. Crude prices bounced off their recent lows and are trading in positive territory for the day. As I write, a barrel of crude is trading for US$57.55, three cents higher than Friday’s final price. At the moment, unleaded gasoline prices are unchanged. Currently US$1.49 will buy a gallon of gas on the wholesale market. Making money… It’s been another quiet day for the Fear and Greed portfolio. With a gain of a six cents, Gentex (GNTX:NASDAQ) is sitting atop the leader board. Since last Thursday, shares of the company have been on a steep, positive climb. US$18 acted as a nice support level for GNTX and shares have made a healthy bounce off of it. There is no reason for the gains not to continue through the week. Also, I’ve got my eye on a new play for the portfolio. If it does what I think it will, you’ll be hearing about it later in the week. Stay tuned. Enjoy your Monday.
Andrew Snyder
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