Month: April 2012

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US automakers released March sales data and the one who topped the chart is Chrysler. Gasoline price rose 20% already since the end of 2011 and numbers just released show the gasoline inventory fell 1.46M barrels. This trend pushed the delivery of subcompact cars to a monthly record. Chrysler’s US sales grow 34% to 163,381 vehicles in the month of March.General Motors and Ford, on the other hand, both fell a bit short. Analysts benchmarked GM’s monthly growth at 19% and the number came out to be only 11.8%. Ford had a fantastic run with the Focus compact model, which rose 65% to more than 28,000 units, but the overall growth was only 5%, vs. the estimated 5.5%.March is usually the peak season for auto sales, and the results we are seeing are not encouraging. Japanese automakers are likely to gain market shares this year because the earthquake last year gave a low base. Their March results are still pending.And let’s not forget about the Germans. Volkswagen already released its March performance, a great 35% uptick, so there will be more work to do for the American automakers. Share what you think we can do to stay competitive. Please send in your comments to our show or tweet me @juliasun_onair. I’m Julia Sun reporting for the Financial News Network in New York City.

Yahoo! made the downsizing move today by cutting 2,000 workers. That’s about 14% of its workforce and the company hopes to save $375M per year from this cutback. Competition for advertising dollars from Google and Facebook took away some public confidence in Yahoo! and led to the departure of co-founder Jerry Yang on Jan of this year. New CEO Scott Thompson is now focusing on building a nimbler company and hopes to reverse the declining revenue. Thompson formerly headed PayPal and helped PayPal to more than double its revenue, and he is being put to test right now.Yahoo!’s share price has been range bound mostly between $15 and $16 for the past six months and analysts on the street have a wide array of ratings on it, from Outperform and $22 price target at RBC and Sell and $14 price target at Goldman Sachs.In my humble opinion, this is a perception game for Yahoo!. It grew with the generation who are now in their 30’s and 40’s, but it never picked up people in their 20’s and younger. Ask any teenager in any American town, I bet they don’t associate Yahoo! with words like cool or hip. So consequently, Yahoo! is losing a young generation whose spending power goes up everyday. Scott Thompson had a great record of boosting user base when he was at PayPal, so let’s watch if he can not only boost the user traffic, but also diversify where the clicks came from. I absolutely welcome your comments if you disagree with me, you can tweet me @juliasun_onair or leave comments for our show. I’m Julia Sun for the Financial News Network and I’ll see you in a bit.

Crude oil supplies went up by 9M barrels last week to 362.4M barrels according to Energy Department’s report today. That’s the biggest inventory gain since 2008 and US crude output reached the highest level in 12 years. Crude oil price took an immediate dive to its 6-week low, rounding off the day at $101 and change.Oil also fell yesterday after the Federal Reserve signaled that it would lean away from QE3. The meeting minute said the Fed would not implement any monetary accommodation unless the economy loses momentum or prices rise at a rate slower than 2%.For more news and updates, keep it right here at the Financial News Network. I’m Julia Sun.

An announcement from the United Kingdom this morning, James Murdoch is stepping down as Chairman of BSkyB, according to CNBC reports.This comes after the media executive stepped down as Chairman of News International on February 29th after facing criticism over the phone hacking scandal that brought down the News of the World tabloid.James Murdoch’s father Rupert Murdoch is head of News Corp which own 39% of British Sky Broadcasting.Shares of News Corp (NASDAQ:NWSA) slipped about 0.5% premarket on that news.

On Tuesday Fossil (NASDAQ:FOSL) officially announced that it closed on its cash-and-stock deal for rival Skagen, reports the Associated Press.Fossil plans to pay Skagen $231.7 million in cash and hand over 150,000 Fossil shares and in addition give Skagen the chance to receive another 100,000 shares, if it attains certain revenue targets.Fossil (NASDAQ:FOSL) has potential upside of 0.9% based on a current price of $133.8 and an average consensus analyst price target of $135.

The markets opened sharply lower today, and continued to add to their losses, despite a jobs report from the ADP that was better than expected. 209,000 jobs were added in the private sector in March, according to the ADP National Employment Report.

Murphy Oil Corporation (MUR) maintained its quarterly dividend of 27.5 cents per share, or $1.10 per share on an annualized basis, representing a yield of approximately 1.9%. The dividend is payable June1,2012 to holders of record May 16, 2012.

As the saying goes, there are many possible reasons for an insider to sell a stock, but only one reason to buy — they expect to make money. So let’s look at two noteworthy recent insider buys.