Another Rotation May Be Ahead By Cody Willard Street.com Contributor 10/11/2006 8:45 AM EDT
Alcoa (AA - commentary - Cramer's Take) missed badly, and now, for the first time in weeks, the answer to the question "Who's more scared: the bulls or the bears?" is "the bulls."
For most of the rally from the July lows, it's been the bears/shorts who have been running scared. The shorts have squeezed themselves out of all kinds of stocks in every sector, adding juice to this rally and keeping that apparent floor under the market, even on down days.
Meanwhile, as the rally's trend became clear and thus "trendly-friendly," the bulls have become emboldened just as the rally has been running out of gas. And now those bulls got hit with Alcoa's miss and the blowup at Legg Mason (LM - commentary - Cramer's Take), a favorite financial stock of the mo-mos. Even Genentech (DNA - commentary - Cramer's Take) traded down after its report.
This morning's action in all three stocks has to make us prepare for the possibility that this earnings season will be characterized by selling the news.
It's also possible that we'll get a rotation from tech to energy [das wäre die Umkehr der bisherigen Rotation von Energie in Tech - A.L.] this earnings season. So many energy bulls have left, and a lot of energy bears are getting short. Meanwhile, tech has been on fire and looks relatively expensive compared to the trailing P/Es of those energy stocks.
We'll have to see whether, even as commodities have pulled back sharply from their highs earlier this year, the earnings at many of these commodity companies are still going to come in strong. If, in general, those earnings do come in even pretty much in line, I wouldn't be shocked to see a tech-to-energy countertrend rotation during earnings season. How Alcoa trades today will be an interesting tell to gauge such a rotation's potential.
Into the weak open we go, then.
Zum Gewinn-Patzer bei Legg Mason:
Legg Mason again to miss earnings expectations; shares off Last Update: 8:33 AM ET Oct 11, 2006
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- Legg Mason Inc. (LM), one of the largest U.S. mutual fund managers, extended its streak of disappointing Wall Street by warning late Tuesday its most recent quarterly earnings will fall well short of analysts' expectations. The company's shares plunged 11.6% to $93.10 in premarket trading Wednesday after the announcement, which prompted Merrill Lynch to advise investors to sell the stock. Merrill had previously rated the stock at Buy.
Legg Mason warned late Tuesday it would report earnings of 96 cents to $1.02 a share for the quarter ended Sept. 30. The 11 analysts surveyed by Thomson First Call on average expected $1.16 a share, and none expected less than $1.12. The warning came as lower than expected results from Alcoa Inc. (AA) got the third-quarter earnings season off to a sour start.
The disappointment is the third straight for the storied mutual fund company, which has struggled to impress analysts since closing a $3.7 billion asset swap that gave it Citigroup Inc.'s (C) asset management arm in December. Legg Mason's results failed to meet analysts' expectations in each of the previous two quarters. The company's shares fell by around 6% on the days of those reports.
Legg Mason attributed the most recent earnings miss to lower than expected revenue and $12 million in unexpected mutual fund distribution fees, which will cost it 4 cents a share. Revenues were 1% weaker than in the previous quarter, when Legg Mason brought in $1.04 billion, because the mix of mutual fund assets under management shifted toward fixed-income assets, which generate lower revenue, the company said.
The distribution-fee problem is messy and unwelcome, but apparently a one-off, said Rachel Barnard, a mutual fund company analyst at Morningstar Inc. The shift in the mix of assets under management is a bigger problem, she said, as it indicates the firm is seeing less success retaining assets in its equity-oriented funds than in the fixed-income funds of its core Western Asset Management unit.
"It looks like they're having trouble retaining assets on the stock side," Barnard said. "That's definitely a cause for concern."
Merrill Lynch analyst Guy Moszkowski estimated Legg Mason's equity funds saw perhaps $6 billion in outflows, and he thinks the leakage will persist. Citing the outflows and the string of earnings disappointments, he said Legg Mason stock could trade at a 10% discount to its peers.
The trouble in equity funds - at a time when the stock market was climbing to a new record - could in part stem from poor performance at the fund run by celebrated manager Bill Miller, who is trailing the S&P 500 after beating the index for the past 15 calendar years. ... |