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Couple of articles from thestreet.con
1st is a revised rehash:
http://www.thestreet.com/story/10711...d-why-now.html
2nd is a respin of the above per orders of Jimmy . . who thought the first sounded a little too positive:
http://www.thestreet.com/_nasdaq/sto...FREE&cm_ite=NA
Q: I wonder how Mr. Corty calculates a "25% chance that the shares have no value"
A: He pulled it out of his ass
But don't take my word for it:
michael.corty@morningstar.com
(312) 696-6228
From BusinessWeek . . . November 30, 2007:
XM and Sirius announced their "merger of equals" in February. Each XM share would be exchanged for 4.6 Sirius shares.
Competing head to head, each firm has its advantages. XM has more subscribers, with more than 9 million listeners expected by the end of the year according to Standard & Poor's equity analyst Tuna Amobi. (S&P, like BusinessWeek, is a unit of The McGraw-Hill Cos.) But it's growing slower than Sirius which is expected to add 2.4 million customers in 2007, for a total of more than 8 million. Both are expected to win more customers as satellite radios are installed in new cars, but here XM has made deals with more automakers, analysts say.
Both companies are unprofitable, posting losses quarter after quarter. With a merger, they could reduce expenses for marketing, acquiring new subscribers and programming, says Morningstar (MORN) analyst Michael Corty.
"Although a merger would benefit both companies, ultimately we don't think the deal will be allowed by the U.S. government," Corty wrote. The government won't "allow a scenario in which consumers have only one option for satellite radio service."
michael.corty@morningstar.com
(312) 696-6228
From February 20, 2007:
"SUSIE GHARIB: Shares of Sirius and XM surged today as investors cheered the $13 billion merger deal between the two satellite radio companies. Sirius jumped 6 percent and XM soared over 10 percent. Sirius CEO Mel Karmazin, who will be the chief executive of the combined company, said today he expects cost savings of between $5 and $6 billion from the deal. Analyst Michael Corty of Morningstar says that the two satellite rivals would save enormous sums by not having to compete with each other."
michael.corty@morningstar.com
(312) 696-6228
Apps aplenty turn smartphones to radios
By Hiawatha Bray
Globe Staff / March 25, 2010
These apps will turn your smartphone into a radio. If you’ve got a smartphone, you’ve got instant access to music, talk, news, and weather, even police radio calls. They are piped over your phone’s 3G network from sources all over the world. To tune in, you just need the right apps. There are plenty of worthy choices, from the free-of-charge to the umpty-ump a month.
Why pay for radio? To get stuff you can’t get any other way. That’s the theory behind the Sirius XM satellite radio service. About 19 million people pay between $13 and $17 a month for access to more than 100 channels of music, news, and chat, along with exclusive programs from the likes of Oprah Winfrey and Howard Stern.
Most people listen in their cars, but Sirius XM offers a listening app for BlackBerries and Apple iPhones. Both are available at siriusxm.com, where you can obtain a free seven-day trial of the service. Subscriptions cost $12.95 a month, or $2.99 for subscribers to the satellite version. The network’s biggest ratings draw, Stern, is unavailable on the smartphone version; also unavailable are live broadcasts of pro football and baseball games. But that leaves plenty of appealing stuff, like Bob Dylan’s Theme Time Radio Hour and Metropolitan Opera Radio.
By the way, many AT&T smartphones come with a satellite radio app from MobiTV Inc. that delivers two dozen XM stations for $8.99 a month. It’s a lousy deal. Skip it.
Still, with my transistor radio I only paid for batteries; the listening was free. Sure enough, plenty of listening options are free or nearly so. About 40 million of us listen to Pandora, the excellent music service that generates custom music channels. Tell it that you like Beyonce, and that’s what you get, along with other artists in the same vein. Pandora apps are now available for nearly every major smartphone at pandora.com.
Pandora sells little banner ads that appear on screen. As a result, the service is free —sort of. You can listen for 40 hours per month without paying a dime. After that, you shell out $36 for a year’s worth of premium, ad-free service, or the music stops.
But not really. You could just switch to some other Pandora-like service. Slacker.com comes to mind. Available for desktops and most smartphones, Slacker doesn’t do quite as good a job of selecting the best tunes. But the listening is limitless. There’s a $4-per-month version that eliminates ads and serves up complete song lyrics, but are Britney’s exact words really that important?
Sometimes you want traditional radio broadcasts, complete with traffic, weather, home improvement ads, and smirking shock jocks. A smartphone can pull in these stations with apps like WunderRadio. This app uses your phone’s GPS system to figure out its location, then displays a list of local radio stations. Just click to listen. For out-of-town listening, you can search out audio streams for thousands of US stations and broadcasters in Canada, Ireland, the United Kingdom, and Australia. There’s even a way to stream Chicago police radio calls and air traffic control chatter from New York’s Kennedy Airport for folks who like that sort of thing. WunderRadio costs $6.99 for iPhones, $10 for the BlackBerry, and $14.95 for Windows Mobile devices. It’s available at wunderradio.com.
Another good choice is ooTunes, a $4.99 iTunes-only app with a slick little feature — it automatically records whatever you’re listening to. You can’t copy the recordings to another device, so it’s useless for illicit file sharing. But you can program it to capture a favorite radio show when you’re not around. Trouble is, you must leave the ooTunes app running at all times to do this, because Apple won’t let two or more iPhone apps run at once. Indeed, this is generally a problem with iPhone music apps. Switch to some other task, and the music stops. But ooTunes has a workaround that lets you stream some radio stations through the phone’s Web browser. It’s clunky but it works, sometimes. You can find ooTunes at Apple’s online iTunes store.
The BlackBerry-only Nobex Radio Companion can be found at nobexrc.com. It includes an index to hundreds of US stations, which you can add to a personal playlist for instant listening.
With most pop stations, you can get the lyrics of the current song. On the other hand, there’s no feature for recording the audio stream.
But then, Nobex has the best feature of all. It’s free, thanks to on-screen advertising. Yes, there’s an available $3.99 subscription package, for listening to stations outside the United States, but when it comes to saving money, I’m an isolationist.
Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com.
Assuming 12mm SAAR . . . anyone care to take a stab at net ads/losses for Q1?
Given:
Penetration Rate 60%
Conversion Rate: 46.4%
Self-Pay Average Monthly Churn Rate: 2%
Self-Pay Subscribers: Say 15,800,000 (R)
Additional Considerations:
Retail Deactivations for 3 Mos Ended 12/31/09: 200,000 (R)
Rental Additions for 3 Mos Ended 12/31/09: 15,000 (R)
Anybody??
A question that often comes up on these boards:
"SIRIUS estimates that Stern only would need to generate approximately 1 million subscribers in order to cover the costs of the deal. Total production and operating costs for the Stern show, including compensation of the show cast and staff, overhead, construction costs for a dedicated studio, and a budget for the development of additional programming and marketing concepts, is estimated to be approximately $100 million per year."
Edmunds.com Forecasts March Auto Sales; Projects 12.4 Million SAAR and Predicts 80 Percent Boost in Toyota Sales
SANTA MONICA, Calif. — March 25, 2010 — This month's new vehicle sales (including fleet sales) are expected to be 1,119,700 units, a 30.9 percent increase from March 2009 and a 43.9 percent increase from February 2010, according to Edmunds.com, the premier online resource for automotive information.
Edmunds.com analysts predict that March's Seasonally Adjusted Annualized Rate (SAAR) will be 12.4 million, up from 10.3 million in February 2010.
"Although this SAAR sounds promising, it's too early to wave the flag and say that the economy has turned the corner," Edmunds.com CEO Jeremy Anwyl told AutoObserver.com. "Incentives drove sales this month, but those were defensive moves in response to Toyota stepping up incentives and are unlikely to last because inventories are simply not high enough to justify them in the long term."
March 2010 had 26 selling days, one more than last March 2009. When adjusted for this difference, sales increased 25.9 percent from March 2009.
Link:
http://www.edmunds.com/help/about/pr...6/article.html
Industry Outlook
Despite ongoing issues with unemployment, consumer spending has been stronger than expected during the first two months of the year and the automotive market is continuing to improve. J.D. Power and Associates' 2010 forecast remains at 11.7 million units for total sales and 9.6 million units for retail sales.
"Due to improving economic conditions, downside risk appears to be subsiding," said Schuster. "However, the market remains very dynamic, and it will be critical for sales momentum to be sustained as the market heads into the spring selling season."
Link:
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-relea...-88544687.html
Well hopefully car sales will continue at this 12.4 rate or higher for the rest of the year. This past month has obviously been greatly helped by all the deals being offered by Toyota and others.
Michael Corty is obviously someone who has an agenda. Amazing that they can get away with spouting this kind of nonsense.
bump thread to top
Is .8 going to hold? We might be back to the days were siri trades on its own. This would be bad considering most of the stocks are trading higher but not siri. The bad thing about this is when the market does pull back, and yes its coming, sounds like a broken record now, it will pull siri down. Glad I shaved at 1.14 and 1.06, not so happy about picking off 5k around a buck. Good luck today.
Case Schiller shows housing is still declining, but wait its a slower rate...so thats good. WTF. Headline is so misleading.
Honestly never ever trust a headline. Some of the spin that gets printed is crazy. Feed the sheeple.
Big Ben
Here are the stocks that saw a bias toward put activity in the previous session. This filtered scan is based on the International Securities Exchange (ISE) buy-to-open data. It looks for stocks where the previous day's put volume on the ISE is at least twice as great as the call volume. It then sorts the stocks based on the put volume. Since this is buy-to-open data, this can be a good source for finding stocks where skepticism is emerging. Contrarians may want to focus on situations where there is put activity on stocks that are still in intermediate-term uptrends. This would be a potentially encouraging sign.
Link: http://www.schaeffersresearch.com/co....aspx?ID=98890
MARCH 30, 2010, 2:22 PM ET
Sirius Could Offer Low-Priced Limited Plans To Used Car Owners
By Eric Savitz
The single biggest growth opportunity for Sirius XM (SIRI) could be the increasingly large number of people driving around in used cars with satellite radio receivers that aren’t being used.
In a research note today, Lazard Capital analyst Barton Crockett estimates that there are 27 million cars on the road with pre-installed satellite radios - and only 11 million of them are subscribers. By 2015, he says, the number of cars with pre-installed radios should grow to 70 million.
The conundrum for Sirius is how to convert more used car drivers into paying subscribers. According to Crockett, SIRI CFO Dave Frear says one approach would be to offer a low-end limited channel option which could expand the market to more cost-conscious consumers without cannibalizing subs to the full channel lineup you get as a new car buyer.
Crockett’s note follows a series of investor meetings with Frear that were hosted by Lazard; here are a couple of useful tidbits from his report:
Frear sees churn improving in 2010; he notes that credit-card defaults are the leading cause of self-pay churn, and says they should go down as the economy recovers.
The CFO sees subscriber acquisition costs/gross subscriber add coming down as more new users come from used cars.
Frear sees downward pressure on programming costs. As for Howard Stern, Crockett says Frear doubts he goes back to terrestrial radio; he also “seems to doubt that Sirius pays more to renew Stern,” adding that the shock jock could “work less, or retire, or come back same as before.”
The CFO laid out for Crockett a path to consolidating the two satellite radio services, which could start by switching all automakers over to one service for future new cars. Crockett says it might make sense to make XM the default choice, since it already is in more new cars than the Sirius service. Over a decade or so, they would consolidate around one service, and eventually sell the other satellite network, or use it for new services.
Meanwhile, on what he calls the “share count flap,” he says that many investors do not like the company’s unusually high 6.5 billion fully diluted share count. A reverse-split could cure this, but Crockett writes that “Frear argues that the low price could appeal to the core retail investors that are Sirius’ key holders.” The analyst says Frear thinks any benefit from appeasing institutional investors over the company’s penny stock status would risk losing core retail holders.
SIRI today is down 0.3 cents, or 0.4%, or 83.9 cents.
David Frear is starting to grow on me . . .
Interesting stuff SR. Thanks for posting that.
PAY ADDS UP FOR TOP SIRIUS XM EXECS
March 30, 2010: In its proxy statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Sirius XM Radio reports its top executives' compensation for 2009, with Mel Karmazin receiving -- along with his base salary of $1.25 million -- a $7 million bonus and $35.2 million in option awards last year.
President/Chief Content Officer Scott Greenstein received a bonus of $1 million along his base salary of $850,000, as well as $850,000 in stock awards and $8 million in option awards, for about $10.7 million for the year.
Sirius XM President/Operations & Sales James Meyer, meanwhile, received a base salary of $950,000, along with a $1.25 million bonus and $1 million in stock awards and $11.5 million in option awards, for a total with other compensatino of about $14.9 million.
All the executives made substantially more in 2009 than the year before, when Karmazin received total compensation of $1.3 million, Greenstein about $2.4 million, and Meyer about $3 million, and none received bonuses.
Sirius XM in 2009 made a deal with Liberty Media that gave that company a 40 percent stake and is believed to have averted a Chapter 11 filing for the satellite radio company. Also, in Q4 of '09 it reported its first profitable quarter since the Sirius-XM merger.
Sirius XM's annual shareholders' meeting is set for May 27.
Link:
http://www.radioink.com/Article.asp?...479&spid=24698
Auto Sales May Reach Most Since ‘Clunkers’ on Toyota (Update1)
By Katie Merx and Keith Naughton
March 31 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. auto sales may have run at the fastest pace this month since the 2009 “cash for clunkers” program as Toyota Motor Corp.’s incentives to counter global recalls spurred rivals to match the discounts.
March has been a “good month” for U.S. sales, Marchionne said yesterday in a speech in New York, predicting an annual rate of 11.5 million light vehicles. His projection, like those of the analysts, underscored the industry’s contraction in the past two years. Annual U.S. sales averaged 16.8 million last decade through 2007. The 2008 total was 13.2 million.
Industrywide deliveries may have risen to an annualized rate of 12 million light vehicles, the average of eight analysts’ estimates compiled by Bloomberg. Toyota said yesterday its sales climbed as much as 35 percent.
Link:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?s...U&pid=20601087
Loss Aversion
No one likes to lose money, but many investors stick with an investment much longer than they ought to in the attempt to avoid losses. Investors are unlikely to think of a loss as a real thing until the stock has been sold and the loss realized, but this is, of course, ridiculous. In the worst-case scenario, this aversion may also lead to increased risk-taking as the investor doubles down in hopes that the gain will wipe out the loss.
This problem can be seen in investors who rabidly support stocks, like the community that has sprung up around Sirius XM(SIRI). Becoming "married" to an investment is never a good idea. As satellite broadcaster Sirius fell from the high single digits to below $1 over the past few years, many investors lost a substantial amount of money. For an investor who had an average cost basis of $6 when the stock fell to $3, he lost half his money. If he had cut his loss and invested in a S&P 500 Index, he would have lost 55% despite the incredible decline in the index at the end of 2008. By sticking with Sirius the entire time, the investor lost 85%.
Accepting that an investment may have been a mistake and moving on to more fertile ground is nothing to be ashamed of. Professional investors do this constantly. Sirius may have an interesting product, but as we saw earlier with representativeness, one shining factor can't outweigh all the disadvantages.
Hi Jimmy . . I have a question . . .
What if I bought shares of Siri at $0.06 Jimmy, and ignored you when you said it was worthless at $0.25 (which was just before you said it was worth $0.60 before a Goldman sell) and today it closes at $0.83. Would that mean that I gained 1,283% Jimmy?
Jimmy Cramer . . from New Hope potting shed to world's smartest man . . it's ok Jimmy, the "Peter Principle" is real . . . nuthin to be ashamed of.
Goldman & Erin still love ya . .
Hello all,
Just returned to Georgia from a hectic and grueling week in Chicago - didn't even have time to sign on here while I was there..
Thanks SR for all the info!
Quote:
Originally Posted by proactiv
Welcome back Proact. :) Hope all went well with your visit, and it wasn't
all grueling.
Julie
Quote:
Originally Posted by proactiv
You haven't missed much . . typical quiet-end-of-quarter . . hopefully the release of auto #'s tomorrow will shake-out some shorts