SiriusXM Weekly Stock Thread for March 29, 2010

[Big Ben]

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

[Sirius Roadkill]

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

[Sirius Roadkill]

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 . . .

[Havakasha]

Interesting stuff SR. Thanks for posting that.

[Sirius Roadkill]

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

[Sirius Roadkill]

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

[Sirius Roadkill]

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 . .

[proactiv]

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!

[SiriMonkey]

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!

Welcome back Proact. Hope all went well with your visit, and it wasn't
all grueling.

Julie

[Sirius Roadkill]

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!

You haven't missed much . . typical quiet-end-of-quarter . . hopefully the release of auto #'s tomorrow will shake-out some shorts