"Having purchased $500 million more $AAPL shares in the last two weeks, our investment has crossed the $3 billion mark yesterday," Icahn wrote on Twitter Wednesday morning.
Apple's board of directors "is doing great disservice to shareholders by not having markedly increased its buyback," Icahn also tweeted. An "in-depth" letter will follow soon, he added.
Apple spokesman Steve Dowling did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment on Wednesday.
Icahn is one of the best known activists, a type of investor who takes large positions in companies that are either under-performing or sitting on a lot of cash. These investors usually push management and directors to change strategies, sell the company or return money to shareholders through share buybacks or increased dividends.
Hot Cheap Companies To Watch For 2015: Utah Medical Products Inc.(UTMD)
Utah Medical Products, Inc. produces medical devices for the healthcare industry primarily in the United States and Europe. The company provides labor and delivery/obstetrics products, including fetal monitoring accessories, vacuum-assisted delivery systems, and other obstetrical tools, as well as neonatal intensive care products, such as DISPOSA-HOOD, an infant respiratory hood; DELTRAN PLUS, a blood pressure monitoring system; and GESCO, a biocompatible silicone catheter. It also offers umbilical vessel and artery, thermosensitive polyurethane, and peripherally inserted central venous catheters; enteral feeding devices; DIALY-NATE, a disposable peritoneal dialysis set; PALA-NATE, a silicone oral protection device; and MYELO-NATE for obtaining cerebral spinal fluid samples. In addition, the company provides gynecology/urology/electrosurgery products comprising LETZ System to excise cervical intraepithelial neoplasia; FINESSE electrosurgical generator; FILTRESSE evacuators ; EPITOME, an electrosurgical scalpel; PATHFINDER PLUS, an endoscopic irrigation device; LIBERTY system to treat and control urinary incontinence in women; ENDOCURETTE, a curette for uterine endometrial tissue sampling; TVUS/HSG-Cath to assess abnormal uterine bleeding; and LUMIN for manipulating the uterus. Further, it offers DELTRAN for blood pressure monitoring; and pressure monitoring accessories, components, and other molded parts. The company?s products are used in neonatal intensive care units, labor and delivery departments, and women?s health center in hospitals, as well as in outpatient clinics and physician's offices. It markets its products through direct sales representatives, independent manufacturers? representatives, specialty distributors, national hospital distribution companies, and other medical device manufacturers; and through other medical device companies and independent medical products distributors. The company was founded in 1978 and is headquar tered in Midvale, Utah.
Advisors' Opinion:- [By Geoff Gannon]
Utah Medical Products (UTMD)
There are some interesting stories on that list. Buffett watchers know The Washington Post. Ben Graham fans know National Presto. Anyone who follows net-nets is familiar with Micropac. If you��e a high ROC investor you��e probably come across Utah Medical Products (operating margins are over 30%). Atrion has one of the most interesting histories of value creation starting in the 1990s. And Arden is a grocer that earns a 15% return on equity in a bad year.
Hot Performing Companies To Invest In 2014: Sun Life Financial Inc.(SLF)
Sun Life Financial Inc., together with its subsidiaries, provides various life and health insurance, savings, investment management, retirement, and pension products and services to individuals and corporate customers. It offers individual life insurance policies, including individual term life, universal life, critical illness, disability, accident, and accidental death and dismemberment insurance policies; and group life insurance policies. The company also provides individual health insurance, long-term care insurance, group health benefits, dental benefits, and group insurance; and various individual and group annuity, retirement, and investment income products and services, such as mutual and pooled funds, variable and fixed annuities, savings, retirement and pension plans, and education savings. In addition, it offers asset management services for corporate retirement plans, separate accounts, public or government funds, and insurance company assets to institutional clients; and advisory services to individual investors. Further, the company provides run-off reinsurance services. Sun Life Financial Inc. distributes its products through direct sales agents, independent and managing general agents, financial intermediaries, broker-dealers, banks, pension and benefit consultants, and other third-party marketing organizations. The company operates primarily in Bermuda, Canada, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Ireland, the Philippines, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Sun Life Financial Inc. was founded in 1999 and is based in Toronto, Canada.
Advisors' Opinion:- [By Monica Gerson]
Sun Life Financial (NYSE: SLF) shares gained 2.47% to create a new 52-week high of $34.80 on Q3 results. Sun Life reported its Q3 operating net income from continuing operations of $422 million.
Hot Performing Companies To Invest In 2014: K12 Inc (LRN)
K12 Inc. (K12), incorporated in December 1999, is a technology-based education company. K12 offers curriculum, software systems and educational services designed to facilitate individualized learning for students primarily in kindergarten through 12th grade, or K-12. The Company provides a continuum of technology-based educational products and solutions to districts, public schools, private schools, charter schools and families. Its products include Curriculum, Pre-K and K-8 Courses, Online School Platform-Learning Management System, High School Courses, Innovative Learning Applications, School Management Systems and PEAK12. Its managed public schools includes Full-time virtual schools and Blended schools, which includes Flex schools, Passport schools, Discovery schools and Other blended schools. Its institutional Business includes K12 curriculum, Aventa curriculum, A+ curriculum, Middlebury joint venture, Pre-kindergarten and Post-secondary. Its international and private pay business includes Managed private schools, The Keystone School, George Washington University Online HS, K12 International Academy, IS Berne, WEB and Independent course sales (Consumer). In April 2011, it acquired the operations of the International School of Berne (IS Berne).
Curriculum
K12 has the digital curriculum portfolio for the K-12 online education industry. The K12 curriculum consists of online lessons, offline instructional kits and materials, and lesson guides and other ancillaries. The Company offers a catalog of courses designed to teach concepts to students from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade, as well as curriculum for use in post-secondary online programs. A single year-long K12 course generally consists of 120 to 180 instructional lessons. Each lesson is designed to last approximately 45 to 60 minutes, although students are able to work at their own pace. With the acquisition of the curriculum portfolios of KCDL (Aventa), AEC (A+) and Kaplan Virtual Education (KVE), as well as the MI! L joint venture, the Company has nearly 700 courses across kindergarten, elementary, middle and high school, including world languages. This combined portfolio contains over 100,000 hours of instructional content and over one million visual, audio and interactive instructional elements in the Company's asset repository.
The Company's K12 online lessons or curricula are accessed through a learning management platform, which the Company calls its Online School (OLS) for K- 8students and the eCollege platforms for high school students, as well as a number of other common industry platforms for students who access Aventa and A+ curricula. Many of the Company's courses utilize learning kits in conjunction with the online lessons to maximize the effectiveness of its learning systems. In addition to receiving access to the Company's online lessons through the Internet, each K-8 student receives a shipment of materials, including textbooks, art supplies, laboratory supplies (such as microscopes, scales, science specimens) and other reference materials which are referred to and incorporated in instruction throughout its curriculum. The Company's courses are generally paired with a lesson guide. Lesson guides work in coordination with the online lessons and include overview information for learning coaches, lesson objectives, lesson outlines and activities, answer keys to student exercises and suggestions for explaining difficult concepts to students.
Pre-K and K-8 Courses
From pre-kindergarten through 8th grade, the Company's courses are generally categorized into seven major subject areas: English and language arts, mathematics, science, history, art, music and world languages. The Company's curriculum includes all of the courses that students need to complete their core kindergarten through 8th grade education; a new pre-K offering students to core subjects through cross-curricular thematic units, building initial and fundamental relationships among concepts. Its learning! systems ! offer the flexibility for each student to take courses at different grade levels in a single academic year, providing flexibility for students to progress at their own level and pace within each subject area.
The first phase of the Company's K12 second generation elementary language arts program is designed to deliver interactivity and make instruction even more engaging while integrating rewards, interactive practice and a virtual world. The Company's Fundamentals of Geometry and Algebra course completes its K-8 math offering. These courses support students at various skill levels through targeted, timely remediation, embody the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and include media integration. In addition, the flexibility of the Company's learning systems allows the Company to tailor its curriculum to state specific requirements. For example, the Company has developed 62 courses specifically created for the public schools standards in 13 states. In addition to the ongoing evolution of the Company's K-5 Math+ program, the Company has also created over 80 custom Math+ sequences to serve specific state needs. The Company continues to migrate K12 K-8 courses from its legacy content management system (CMS) to its new CMS.
Online School Platform-Learning Management System
For the Company's K12 curriculum users in grades K-8, the Company provides a learning management system, its OLS platform. The OLS platform is an adaptive, intuitive, Web-based software platform that provides access to the Company's online lessons, its lesson planning and scheduling tools, as well as its progress tracking tool which serves a key role in assisting parents and teachers in managing each student's progress. The OLS is also the central structure through which students, parents, teachers and administrators interact using K-mail and Class Connect (the Company's integrated synchronous session scheduler). Students, parents and teachers can access the Company's online tools and lessons through t! he OLS fr! om anywhere with an Internet connection. The Company licenses a third-party learning management system for uses in its high school program.
High School Courses
The curriculum available to high school students is broader and varies from student to student. Students also are able to select from a range of electives. The Company has augmented its lab program for lab science courses with the creation of alternate kit-free science labs for the formerly kit-based high school science labs in order to provide a more flexible and robust lab program across its physical science, earth science, biology, chemistry and physics courses. The Company's overall lab program includes traditional kit-based labs based on either shipped-in or household materials, virtual labs, video-based labs, data-collection and data-manipulation labs, and field studies. Across all subject areas, the K12 core curriculum accounts for approximately 90% of the Company's high school course enrollments. It also offers curriculum marketed as its Aventa Learning by K12 product line. Aventa courses are written to national academic standards and each of Aventa's 22 AP courses has been reviewed and approved by The College Board. Aventa's online courses are developed by subject matter experts designed by multimedia teams and delivered by high school instructors. Aventa classes are primarily delivered over the Internet and use a variety of interactive elements to keep students engaged throughout.
The Company has A+ courseware, which is in use in over 5,000 public and private K-12 schools, charter schools, colleges, correctional institutions, centers of adult literacy, military education programs and after-school learning centers. The A+nyWhere Learning System provides an integrated offering of instructional software and assessment for reading, mathematics, language arts, science, writing, history, government, economics and geography for grade levels K-12. In addition, AEC provides assessment testing and instructi! onal cont! ent for the General Educational Development (GED) test. AEC products are designed to provide for LAN, WAN and Internet delivery options and support Windows and Macintosh platforms. Spanish-language versions are available for mathematics and language arts for grade levels 1-6.
The Company offers online world language courses and summer immersion language instruction programs through its MIL joint venture. In addition to offering powerspeaK12 language courses, this venture also offers innovative, online language programs for high school and middle school students based on the Middlebury College pedagogy. The new courses use instructional tools such as animation, music, videos and other elements that immerse students in new languages. Beginner French, Chinese and Spanish for high school students, as well as Chinese, French, Latin, Spanish and German courses for middle and high school students are available and additional courses are in development. The joint venture has expanded the Middlebury-Monterey Language Academy (MMLA), a foreign language immersion summer program for middle and high school students, which includes a day academy for middle school students, as well as the Company's four-week residential academy with instruction in Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian and Spanish at multiple college campuses.
Innovative Learning Applications
The Company has created tools that allow for more rapid mobile and tablet curriculum or content deployment across platforms for deeper markets penetration. Seven additional mobile applications were delivered during the fiscal year ended June 30, 2012 (fiscal 2012), for a total of 15 applications available for download. These apps have been downloaded over 400,000 times. It offers applications for the iPhone, Android phones and Android tablet marketplaces, adapting many of its curriculum features for the mobile application space. An active educational games initiative is delivering new methods for engagement, practice and r! eview of ! K-12 concepts, including narrative/immersive styles, rewards, persistent data, complex algorithms. The Company has delivered a total of nine interactive games and an innovative review and practices portal called Noodleverse. Noodleverse includes over 1,700 activities and is designed for K-2 students in conjunction with a new language arts program.
The Company has delivered alternatives for its educational partners who desires materials-free curriculum. This includes converting over 59 existing materials-based high school Science labs into interactive virtual labs and video lab This laboratory is performed at a lab bench with all the materials and with the same procedures high school students would use in a physical chemistry laboratory. During fiscal 2012, the Company had converted 35 K12 textbooks used across 57 courses into an electronic format, including textbooks, reference guides, literature readers and lab manuals. This digital delivery ability enables the Company to offer options to the Company's customers through interactive online books that enhance the student's reading experience reinforce the student's learning approach and create a new method for delivering book and print materials. Each offline book is converted into an electronic book format with a custom user interface to be viewed through a standard Web browser or a commercially available electronic reader (Kindle and Nook).
The Company has learning management systems and can build courses that are adaptive, which enable individualized learning experiences as the course adapts at key points to student behavior and input. The Company's MARK12 reading remediation product captures individual students' successes and challenges as they practice phonemic awareness, alphabetic principles, accuracy and fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. The program serves the individual student more exercises, practice and review in areas of difficulty. During fiscal 2012, the Company launched a pilot program for school year call! ed Nation! al Math Lab, designed as a controlled study with randomly selected treatment and control groups from a pool of students in grades 5-10 identified as significantly below grade level in math. The Company continues to explore opportunities to enhance student engagement through strategic use of relevant multimedia. Multimedia is specifically used as appropriate for the subject matter.
School Management Systems
School Management Systems (SAMS) is the Company's student information system. SAMS is integrated with the OLS and several other systems, including the Company's Online Enrollment System that allows parents to complete school enrollment forms online and its order management system that generates orders for learning kits and computers to be delivered to students. SAMS stores student-specific data and is used for a range of functions, including enrolling students in courses, assigning progress marks and grades, tracking student demographic data, and generating student transcripts. The Company has TotalView a range of online applications that provides administrators, teachers, parents and students a unified view of student progress, attendance, communications, and learning kit shipment tracking. TotalView includes a means of documenting student engagement in required classroom activities, identification of those students struggling with grade level state content standards, and previous year's performance on state tests. TotalView also includes K-mail, the Company's internal communications system. Through K-mail, administrators and teachers can communicate electronically with learning coaches and students. TotalView also includes an enrollment processing and tracking tool that allows it to closely monitor and manage the enrollment process for new students.
PEAK12
The Company has an online learning solution called PEAK12. This solution simplifies a district's management of online learning by consolidating multiple solutions on a single platform. It allow! s adminis! trators and teachers to manage enrollments, programs and performance tracking, alerts and reporting across multiple online solutions from a single solution. In addition, through the PEAK12 library, districts can search, build, provision and publish content or course modifications or new course solutions using various online learning assets. PEAK12 provides unparalleled capabilities for districts wanting to operate multiple solutions or catalogs from a single place and offers personalization features that can be managed at the district, school or teacher level.
The Company competes with DeVry, Inc., Pearson PLC, White Hat Management, LLC, National Network of Digital Schools Management Foundation Inc., Apex Learning Inc., Compass Learning, E2020 Inc., OdysseyWare, PLATO Learning, Inc., Rosetta Stone Inc., Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw-Hill Companies, Pearson PLC., The Laurel Springs School, the National Connections Academy and Florida Virtual School.
Advisors' Opinion:- [By Rick Aristotle Munarriz]
Bloomberg via Getty Images Companies can make brilliant moves, but there are also times when things don't work out quite as planned. From an online educator getting schooled to a PC dinosaur showing signs of coming back to life, here's a rundown of the week's best and worst in the business world. Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) -- Winner PC sales continue to slide, but market leader HP is turning things around. Industry tracker IDC may have served up some grim metrics for the state of desktops and laptops -- global PC shipments were down by nearly 8 percent, making this the sixth consecutive quarter of slipping sales -- but IDC estimates that HP bucked the trend by shipping more computers than it did a year earlier. The trend is even better domestically. HP was already having a good week when CEO Meg Whitman explained why she felt her company was well-positioned to thrive in the future. The IDC report suggests that HP's rosy future is now. K12 (LRN) -- Loser Online learning has come under fire in recent years. Are the students engaged enough? Is the education effective? Are the cost savings worth the shortcomings of the virtual classroom? We still don't have all of the answers, but we may be seeing enrollments peaking. Shares of K12 were slammed this week after the provider of Web-based curriculums for grade school students posted a disappointing outlook. K12 saws enrollments increased by a softer than expected 6 percent in its latest quarter. K12 also now sees revenue for the entire fiscal year that ends in June clocking in between $905 million and $925 million. Analysts were perched at $988 million. Ouch. That's not a passing grade. Microsoft (MSFT) -- Winner HP wasn't the only winner in IDC's review of the PC industry during the third quarter. Four of the five largest PC makers in this country saw their shipments increase. The lone holdout was Apple (AAPL) experiencing an 11 percent slide in Mac and MacBook sales during the period. That's sweet news for Mic
Hot Performing Companies To Invest In 2014: GigOptix Inc (GIG)
GigOptix, Inc. (GigOptix), incorporated on March 2008, is a supplier of semiconductor and electro-optical component products that enables high-speed end to end data streaming over optical fiber and wireless telecommunications and data-communications networks globally. The Company's products convert signals between electrical and optical formats for transmitting and receiving data over fiber optic networks and between electrical and high speed radio frequencies to enable the transmission and receipt of data over wireless networks. The Company is creating both optical telecommunications and data-communications applications for fast growing markets in 10 giga bytes per second (Gbps), 40Gbps and 100Gbps drivers, receiver integrated circuits (IC), electro-optic modulator components and multi-chip-modules (MCM), as well as E-band wireless data-communications applications for high speed mobile backhaul and other high capacity wireless data transport applications. During the year ended December 31, 2011, the Company shipped over 150 products to over 200 customers.
The Company offers a portfolio of 10Gbps and 40Gbps electro-optical products and is developing market for 100Gbps products. The Company provides bundled solutions that consist of a few of its products, such as modulator and driver. The Company also offers a comprehensive portfolio of Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuit (MMIC) and application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) products to support E-band wireless communication and defense markets. The Company has also developed 10Gbps vertical cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) drivers and receivers for aerospace as well as outdoor, non-temperature controlled environments that enables higher capacity in its customers' next generation flight and data center systems.
The Company has a portfolio of products for telecommunications , data-communications, defenses and industrial applications designed for optical speeds from 3Gbps to over 100Gbps and for wireless frequencies! from zero giga hertz (GHz) to 86GHz. The Company's products support a range of data rates, protocols, transmission distances and industry standards.
The Company's portfolio consists of the product ranges, such as laser and modulator drivers for 10Gbps, 40Gbps and 100Gbps applications; receiver amplifiers or Trans-impedance Amplifiers (TIAs) for 10Gbps, 40Gbps and 100Gbps applications; VCSEL driver and receiver chipsets for 14 and 12 channel parallel optics applications from 3Gbps to 10Gbps; Electro-optic modulators based on the Company's TFPS technology suitable for various 40Gbps and 100Gbps modulation schemes, such as differential phase shift keying (DPSK), differential quadrature phase shift keying (DQPSK), RZ-DQPSK and DP-QPSK; wideband monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC) amplifiers with flat gain response; high frequency MMIC Power Amplifiers with high gain and output power; high frequency passive attenuators and filters in small form factors, and standard cell, and structured ASIC and hybrid ASIC designs and manufacturing service for multiple markets offering information technology acquisition review (ITAR) compliance for defense applications. The Company designs and market products that amplifies electrical signals during both the transmission (amplifiers and optical drivers) and reception (TIAs) of optical signals as well as modulate optical signals in the transmission of data.
The Company's optical drivers amplify the input digital data stream that is used to modulate laser light either by direct modulation of the laser or by use of an external modulator that acts as a precise shutter to switch on and off light to create the optical data stream. The Company supplies an optimized component for each type of laser, modulator and photo-diode depending upon the speed, reach and required cost. The Company's microwave and millimeter wave amplifiers amplify small signal radio signals into more signals that can be transmitted over long distances to establish high t! hroughput! data connections or enable radar based applications. The Company's ASIC solutions are used in a number of applications such as defense and test and measurement applications to enable the high speed processing of complex signals.
The Company's product portfolio is designed to cover the range of solutions needed in these different modules. The Company's product portfolio consists of five product lines: GX Series, which includes serial drivers and TIA ICs devices for telecom and data-com markets; HX Series, which includes multi-channel driver and TIA ICs for short reach data-com and optical interconnect applications; LX Series, which includes TFPS modulators for high speed telecom and defense applications; EX Series, which includes amplifiers, filters and attenuators for microwave applications in defense and instrumentation, and CX Series, which includes family of ASIC solutions for custom integrated circuit design.
GX Series
The GigOptix GX Series of products services both the telecom and data-com markets with a broad portfolio of drivers and transimpedence amplifiers that address 10Gbps, 40Gbps and 100Gbps speeds over distances that range from 100 meters to 10,000 kilometers. The GX Series devices are used in FiberChannel, Ethernet, synchronous optical networking (SONET)/ synchronous digital hierarchy (SDH) components and those based upon the optical internetworking forum (OIF) standards.
HX Series
The GigOptix HX Series of products service the high performance computing (HPC), data-com and consumer markets with a portfolio of parallel VCSEL drivers and TIAs that address 3Gbps, 5Gbps,10Gbps, 14Gbps, 16Gbps and 25Gbps channel speeds over 100-300 meters distances in four and 12 channel configurations. The HX Series devices are used in HPC formats, Infiniband, Ethernet and optical high definition multimedia interface (HDMI) components.
LX Series
The GigOptix LX Series of products service the 40Gbps and above telecom! market f! or Mach-Zehnder modulators. The LX Series devices are based on the Company's TFPS EO material technology.
EX Series
The GigOptix EX Series of products leverages the high performance products acquired in the Endwave acquisition. In addition, it also includes the die and design techniques developed for the GX Series telecom and data-com drivers for related defense and instrumentation applications.
CX Series
The GigOptix CX Series of products offers a portfolio of distinct paths to digital and analog mixed signal ASICs with the capability of supporting designs of up to 10M gates in technologies ranging from 0.6 through 65nm. The CX Series uses the Company's technology in Structured and Hybrid ASICs to enable a generic ASIC solution that can be customized for a customer using only a few metal mask layers. The CX Series also offers ASIC services, including Analog and Mixed Signal IP into designs and taking customers designs from RTL or gate-level net list definitions to volume production with third party foundries.
The Company competes with TriQuint, Rohm, InPhi, Centellax, Semtech, Vitesse, M/A-Com, Avago, Emcore, Tyco Electronics, IPtronics. Avago, Emcore, Tyco Electronics, JDSU, Oclaro, Sumitomo, Fujitsu, Emcore, Oclaro, Hittite, Sumitomo, Hittite, RFMD, Northrop Grumman, On -Semiconductor, eSilicon, Open Silicon, Faraday, Toshiba and eASIC.
Advisors' Opinion:- [By Bryan Murphy]
It's admittedly overbought and due for a slight dip thanks to today's surge. But when you take a step back and look at GigOptix Inc. (NYSEMKT:GIG), there's actually a lot to be excited about if you've been mulling a trading in GIG. The trick will be getting the timing right.
- [By maarnio]
Lightwave Logic�� main competitor is GigOptix (GIG). GigOptix has designed and patented potentially commercially feasible electro-optic polymers and holds an exclusive license to all electro-optic polymeric technology developed at the University of Washington.
No comments:
Post a Comment