Best Life Sciences Stocks To Own For 2014

Ford Motor Company (F) announced on Wednesday the addition of two new board members.

The automaker named James P. Hackett and John C. Lechleiter as the newest members of the company’s board of directors. Hackett’s new role will begin immediately, while Lechlieter will officially join on October 1, 2013.

Hackett is currently the CEO of Steelcase, Inc–a furniture maker–and also serves on the board of Fifth Third Bancorp, the National Center for Arts and Technology, and the��Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy and Life Sciences Institute at University of Michigan. Lechlieter is the President and CEO of Eli Lilly and Company, one of the largest pharmaceutical firms in the world, and also serves on the board of Nike, Inc, United Way�Worldwide, Xavier University, the Central Indiana Corporate Partnership and the Life Sciences Foundation.

Top 5 Tech Stocks For 2015: Diana Containerships Inc.(DCIX)

Diana Containerships Inc. owns and operates containerships in Greece. The company engages in the seaborne transportation of semi-finished and finished consumer and industrial products. As of February 23, 2012, its fleet consisted of 8 containerships with a carrying capacity of approximately 32,693 twenty-foot equivalent units. Diana Containerships Inc. was founded in 2010 and is based in Athens, Greece.

Advisors' Opinion:

• [By Monica Gerson]

  Diana Containerships (NASDAQ: DCIX) is projected to report its Q1 earnings at $0.01 per share on revenue of $13.22 million.

  Intrawest Resorts Holdings (NYSE: SNOW) is expected to post its Q3 earnings at $2.69 per share on revenue of $294.89 million.

Best Life Sciences Stocks To Own For 2014: Telefonica SA(TEF)

Telefonica, S.A. provides fixed and mobile telephony services primarily in Spain, rest of Europe, and Latin America. Its fixed telecommunication services include PSTN lines; ISDN accesses; public telephone; local, domestic, and international long distance and fixed-to-mobile communications; corporate communications; video telephony; supplementary and business-oriented value-added services; network services; leasing and sale of handset equipment; and telephony information services. The company?s Internet and broadband multimedia services comprise Internet service provider service; portal and network services; retail and wholesale broadband access; narrowband switched access to Internet; naked ADSL, a broadband connection; residential-oriented value-added services; companies-oriented value-added services; television services, such as IPTV, cable television, and satellite television; and Fiber to the Home, a service for high speed Internet access and digital video recording. Its data and business-solutions services principally include leased lines; virtual private network services; fiber optics services; the provision of hosting and application; outsourcing and consultancy services; desktop services; and system integration and professional services. The company?s wholesale services for telecommunication operators primarily comprise domestic interconnection services; international wholesale services; leased lines for other operators? network deployment; local loop leasing under the unbundled local loop regulation framework; and bit stream services. It also offers various mobile and related services and products that include mobile voice services, value added services, mobile data and Internet services, wholesale services, corporate services, roaming, fixed wireless, and trunking and paging services. The company has a strategic alliance with China Unicom (Hong Kong) Limited. Telefonica, S.A. was founded in 1924 and is headquartered in Madrid, Spai n.

Advisors' Opinion:

• [By Dan Caplinger]

  With dividend stocks, however, you have no guarantee that there's no assurance that you'll receive a dividend. For instance, Spanish telecom company Telefonica (NYSE: TEF  ) chose last year not to pay its planned dividend for 2012, saying it would restore half the payout later this year. Even stalwart blue-chips General Electric (NYSE: GE  ) and Pfizer (NYSE: PFE  ) had to reduce their dividends dramatically during the financial crisis, and even now, they haven't risen back to their pre-crisis levels.

• [By Jayson Derrick]

  Telefonica (NYSE: TEF) announced it is in talks to acquire an un-named Mexican rival for as much as 3 billion euros. Shares gained 1.22 percent, closing at $16.63.

Best Life Sciences Stocks To Own For 2014: GNC Acquisition Holdings Inc. (GNC)

GNC Holdings, Inc. operates as a specialty retailer of health and wellness products. It operates through three segments: Retail, Franchise, and Manufacturing/Wholesale. The company�s products include vitamins, minerals, and herbal supplement products, as well as sports nutrition products, diet products, and other wellness products. It also manufactures its branded products for various third parties. The company sells its products under GNC proprietary brands, including Mega Men, Ultra Mega, Total Lean, Pro Performance, and Pro Performance AMP, as well as under third-party brands. As of March 31, 2013, it had approximately 8,200 locations, including 6,200 retail locations in the United States; and franchise operations in 55 countries. The company sells its products through company-owned domestic retail stores, domestic and international franchise activities, third-party contract manufacturing, e-commerce, and corporate partnerships. It also offers its products at GNC.com, LuckyVitamin.com, and drugstore.com. GNC Holdings, Inc. was founded in 1935 and is headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Advisors' Opinion:

• [By jaggom]

  Due to the reasons mentioned above, the awareness about keeping healthy and taking proper nutrition is spreading fast among people. Vitamins and supplements are more of a part of the lifestyle nowadays due to which the wellness industry is a flourishing business. GNC Holdings (GNC) and Herbalife (HLF) are popular in the wellness and dietary supplements market.

Best Life Sciences Stocks To Own For 2014: Bio-Reference Laboratories Inc.(BRLI)

Bio-Reference Laboratories, Inc. provides clinical laboratory testing services for the detection, diagnosis, evaluation, monitoring, and treatment of diseases primarily in the greater New York metropolitan area. It offers various chemical diagnostic tests, including blood and urine analysis, blood chemistry, hematology services, serology, radio-immuno analysis, toxicology, pap smears, tissue pathology, and other tissue analysis. The company also operates a clinical knowledge management service unit, which uses customer data from laboratory results, pharmaceutical data, claims data, and other data sources to provide administrative and clinical decision support systems. In addition, it operates a Web-based connectivity portal solution for laboratories and physicians to provide laboratory ordering and results to physician customers. The company provides its services directly to physicians, geneticists, hospitals, clinics, and correctional and other health facilities. Bio-Refe rence Laboratories, Inc. was founded in 1981 and is headquartered in Elmwood Park, New Jersey.

Advisors' Opinion:

• [By Geoff Gannon] strong>DreamWorks (DWA)

  Read these reports. Look for something that might have interested me. Why would Geoff look at DNB, Chuck E. Cheese, etc.? What got him interested in the stock? Do I see the same thing?

  Whenever possible, also read the quarterly earnings call transcripts. You can listen to them too. But it�� easier if you read them and listen to them.

  Just listening is a bad idea.

  Whenever I can get a transcript of anything ��even Warren Buffett�� appearance on CNBC ��I��l keep a copy of the transcript even when I have a copy of the video (or audio). You can refer back to a transcript easily. You can highlight. You can take notes.

  Taking Notes

  Now, you are doing those things when reading an annual report, right?

  You never just sit down and read an annual report. You always sit down with a pen, a highlighter, a pad of paper, and a calculator. Use the margins of a 10-K ��or your pad of paper ��to jot down notes. Ask questions. Do calculations.

  If you ever see a 10-K after I��e read it ��it�� not very white anymore. There�� lots of stuff written in the margins. Mostly it�� questions I was asking myself. But it�� also calculations of numbers the company does not provide.

  Numbers to Know

  So, for example, in a bank�� 10-K I always write down:

  路 Deposits per share

  路 Deposits per branch

  路 Cost of deposits

  路 Texas Ratio

  You can actually look up the Texas Ratio of any bank here. And some banks calculate and report cost of deposits the way I like to think about it. But, it�� not common for banks to report deposits per branch ��although small banks will sometimes mention (perhaps in the shareholder letter) what their biggest branch has in deposits. Others may mention how quickly new branches achieved a deposit milestone.

  Those are the kinds of numbers I write in the margins of a bank�� 10-K. There will be questions like: ��hy is e

• [By Geoff Gannon]

  But if you can definitely hold a company through a tough market that lasts a few years ��then you can look for a wonderful business to buy and hold at any time. In any market. I found some lovely businesses around the time of the 2000 market peak. They just weren�� big caps, dot coms, etc. They were smaller more mundane businesses. In at least one case ��Bio-Reference Labs (BRLI) ��I made some money (it seemed like a scary big amount at the time) holding the stock for about 2 years but I would��e made a whole lot more if I had just held that one stock through till today. And even now BRLI seems a fine stock to keep holding. So, you see I could��e saved myself a lot of trouble by holding something for more than 10 years. And it wouldn�� have hurt my performance at all. In fact, BRLI has beaten the market by a lot for a very long time. And, yes, the price I paid for BRLI happens to be the most I ever paid for a stock relative to its record earnings. So, I paid a very high price ��for a value investor like me ��for a stock that promptly went on to return around 20% a year for the next 10 years and is now back at almost the exact same P/E ratio where I first bought it.

• [By Monica Gerson]

  Bio-Reference Laboratories Inc (NASDAQ: BRLI) is projected to report its Q4 earnings at $0.63 per share on revenue of $228.81 million.

  Posted-In: Earnings scheduleEarnings News Pre-Market Outlook Markets

Best Life Sciences Stocks To Own For 2014: Tribune Co (TRBAA)

Tribune Company, incorporated on March 19, 1968, is a media and entertainment company engaged in newspaper publishing, television and radio broadcasting and entertainment through its subsidiaries. The Company�� operations are divided into two industry segments: publishing and broadcasting and entertainment. In publishing, the Company�� daily newspapers include the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, Sun Sentinel (South Florida), Orlando Sentinel, Hartford Courant, The Morning Call and Daily Press. The company�� broadcasting group operates 23 television stations, WGN America on national cable and Chicago�� WGN-AM.

Broadcasting

The Company�� broadcasting owns and operates 23 major-market television stations and reaches more than 80% of United States television households. The group is anchored by WGN America, which can be seen in more than 70 million United States households via cable and satellite services. 13 Tribune stations are affiliates of The CW. Seven are FOX affiliates.

Publishing

The Company�� newspapers include the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune. Tribune Media Services specializes in entertainment listings and syndication, providing news and information for print, broadcast and interactive media.

Tribune Digital

Tribune Digital manages the operations of Tribune�� daily newspapers and their associated Websites, plus all aspects of the Company�� classified advertising operations, as well as Websites for Tribune�� TV stations. Its national classified sites include CareerBuilder.com, Cars.com and Apartments.com.

Advisors' Opinion:

• [By Tim Brugger]

  Murray McQueen has been named to the newly created position of president, real estate, to oversee Tribune's (NASDAQOTH: TRBAA  ) "valuable portfolio of more than seven million square feet of real estate assets," the company announced today. McQueen will take over his new role effective immediately.

• [By Michael Lewis]

  The owner of the Los Angeles Times, and recent bankruptcy court emergent,�Tribune� (NASDAQOTH: TRBAA  ) �has made some interesting moves since its downfall in 2008, when the company drowned under the weight of its $13 billion debt load -- a parting gift from a leveraged buyout a year earlier. This week, the story got even more interesting, as management announced that the company would split its profitable operations (TV), and its less appealing businesses (papers), into two separate entities. While more details need to emerge before we can determine whether the company is a worthwhile investment, this unloved company could present an interesting opportunity to sophisticated investors.

Best Life Sciences Stocks To Own For 2014: Dover Motorsports Inc (DVD)

Dover Motorsports, Inc. is a marketer and promoter of motorsports entertainment in the United States. The Company, through its subsidiaries, owned and operated Dover International Speedway in Dover, Delaware and Nashville Superspeedway near Nashville, Tennessee. During the year ended 2011, the Company�� facilities promoted 10 events under the auspices of the sanctioning body, the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR). During 2011, the Company promoted 2 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series events, 4 NASCAR Nationwide Series events, 3 NASCAR Camping World Truck Series events, and 1 NASCAR K&N Pro Series East event.. On January 31, 2011, the Company sold its Memphis Motorsports Park facility.

Dover International Speedway

The Company has promoted NASCAR-sanctioned racing events at Dover International Speedway. As of December 31, 2011, it promoted six NASCAR-sanctioned events at the facility annually. Two races are in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series professional stock car racing circuit, two races are in the NASCAR Nationwide Series racing circuit, one race is in the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series racing circuit and one race is in the NASCAR K&N Pro Series East racing circuit. Each of the NASCAR Nationwide Series events and the Camping World Truck Series event at Dover International Speedway are conducted on the days before a NASCAR Sprint Cup Series event. Dover International Speedway is one of only seven speedways in North America that presents two NASCAR Sprint Cup Series events and two NASCAR Nationwide Series events each year. Additionally, it is one of only five tracks to host three NASCAR events at one facility on the same weekend.

Dover International Speedway, known as the Monster Mile, is a high-banked, one-mile, concrete superspeedway with permanent seating capacity of approximately 132,000. The superspeedway facility also features the Monster Bridge. The climate controlled bridge spans across the width of the superspeedway at a height of 29 feet ! and houses 50-luxury seats, a refreshment bar and other amenities.

Nashville Superspeedway

Nashville Superspeedway (Nashville) is a motorsports complex approximately 35 miles from downtown Nashville in Wilson County, Tennessee. The 1.33-mile concrete superspeedway has 25,000 permanent grandstand seats with an infrastructure in place to expand to 150,000 seats as demand requires. Additionally, construction included lights at the superspeedway to allow for nighttime racing and the foundation work for a dirt track, short track and drag strip. Nashville Superspeedway promoted two NASCAR Nationwide Series events and two NASCAR Camping World Truck Series event, during 2011. The facility also hosted other regional and national touring events, as well as track rentals.

Advisors' Opinion:

• [By CRWE]

  Dover Motorsports, Inc. (NYSE:DVD) Board of Directors today declared an annual cash dividend on both classes of common stock of $.04 per share. The dividend will be payable on December 10, 2012 to shareholders of record at the close of business on November 10, 2012. Due to the seasonal nature of our business, we will evaluate dividends annually.