Tag Archives: SFD

Business, Finance, Occupation & Industry

24/7 Wall St. Closing Bell — March 11, 2013: Markets Recover Slightly from Low Open (BBY, BTU, SFD, ADBE, MT, CSIQ, CHYR, DKS, RENN, CVI, DMND, FCEL, URBN, BONT, SSI, BBRY, T, ZNGA, YHOO)

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By 24/7 Wall St.

Bull and Bear figures

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U.S. equity markets opened lower this morning after France reported a decline in industrial production and China reported consumer inflation up more than expected (more coverage here). There was no significant data reported in the U.S. today, so the weak opening eventually gave way to buying, pushing stocks into positive gains by around noon. The gains were modest with financial stocks leading the gains, while energy, technology, and telecom stocks trailed along. In Japan, the nominee for the central bank’s Board of Governors said he did not think that the current asset purchase plan was big enough to allow the country’s to reach its 2% inflation goal. The volatility index notched a six-year low today (more coverage here).

The U.S. dollar index fell 0.12% today, now at 82.589. The GSCI commodity index is up 0.3% at 648.81, with commodities prices mixed again today. WTI crude oil closed up 0.1% today, at $92.06 a barrel. Brent crude trades down 0.7% at $110.10 a barrel. Natural gas is up 0.4% today at about $3.65 per million BTUs. Gold settled up 0.1% today at $1,578.00 an ounce.

The unofficial closing bells put the DJIA up about 50 points to 14,447.22 (0.35%), the NASDAQ rose nearly 9 points (0.26%) to 3,252.87, and the S&P 500 rose 0.32% or about 5 points to 1,556.22.

There were a several analyst upgrades and downgrades today, including Best Buy Co. Inc. (NYSE: BBY) raised to ‘overweight’ at Piper Jaffray; Peabody Energy Corp. (NYSE: BTU) cut to ‘market perform’ at BMO; Smithfield Foods Inc. (NYSE: SFD) raised to ‘neutral’ at BofA/Merrill Lynch; Adobe Systems Inc. (NASDAQ: ADBE) cut to ‘neutral’ at BofA/Merrill Lynch; and ArcelorMittal (NYSE: MT) raised to ‘buy’ at UBS.

Earnings reports since markets closed last Friday resulted in several price moves today, including these: Canadian Solar Inc. (NASDAQ: CSIQ) is down 14.6% at $3.19 (more coverage here); Chyron Corp. (NASDAQ: CHYR) is up 8.6% at $0.93; and Renren Inc. (NASDAQ: RENN) is up 0.7% at $3.09.

Before markets open tomorrow morning we are scheduled to hear from CVR Energy Inc. (NYSE: CVI), Diamond Foods Inc. (NASDAQ: DMND), Fuel Cell Energy Inc. (NASDAQ: FCEL), Urban Outfitters Inc. (NASDAQ: URBN), Bon-Ton Stores Inc. (NASDAQ: BONT), and Stage Stores Inc. (NYSE: SSI)

Some standouts among high-volume stocks today include:

BlackBerry (NASDAQ: BBRY) is up 13.4% at $14.81. The mobile phone maker got a boost from an announcement that AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) would begin accepting pre-orders tomorrow for the company’s first touchscreen phone. More coverage here.

Zynga Inc. (NASDAQ: ZNGA) is up 10.6% at $3.95. The game developer’s shares jumped this afternoon following an analyst’s comment that Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) may be interested in acquiring the company.

Dick’s Sporting Goods Inc. (NYSE: DKS) is down 10.9% at $45.11. The sporting goods retailer reported weak results and offered lower guidance than analysts were expecting. More coverage here.

Stay tuned for Tuesday. We have noted the following events on the schedule (all times Eastern):

Business, Finance, Occupation & Industry

Shareholder Attack of Smithfield Has Risks, But Merits Too (SFD, HRL, TSN)

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By 24/7 Wall St.

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Smithfield Foods Inc. (NYSE: SFD) is trading higher on word that a top shareholder called Continental Grain Co. has sent a letter urging the company to consider strategic alternatives. These alternatives include a breakup of the company into three units and include a dividend. We have just pondered whether or not there is the formation of an activist investor bubble happening or not, but either way this effort to drive Smithfield has some points which are very hard to ignore.

We cannot help but wonder if this strategy is a bit aggressive for the company if executed in full. Continental Grain owns about 6% of Smithfield, but what is interesting is that the group has recently lightened up by selling a small portion of its stake. The activist letter states:

Since the current management took over on August 31st, 2006 and through March 1, 2013, Smithfield stock has declined by 26 percent while, including dividends, Tyson Foods Inc. (NYSE: TSN) stock returned +70 percent and Hormel Foods Corporation (NYSE: HRL) returned +131 percent — a shocking divergence in shareholder return among industry competitors. During this time, Smithfield has paid no cash dividends, while Tyson has cumulatively paid $429 million and Hormel has paid $728 million.

Despite the poor performance of Smithfield stock (last year alone it was down 11 percent while the S&P was up 16 percent), management has been extremely well compensated. The CEO has received $37 million in total compensation over the past two years.

While a breakup into three units would probably unlock value, it is important to realize that the market cap here at a new 52-week high of $25.67 is only $3.57 billion. That may just unlock value to the point of irrelevance for each of the units. That being said, it is pretty unforgivable that Smithfield has not paid a dividend out to its shareholders. If the company could take away that $37 million going forward then it would have enough to pay a 1% dividend yield without dipping into other cash.

Here are the points of interest in a supplement to the SEC filing which outline Continental’s efforts.

Filed under: 24/7 Wall St. Wire, Activist Investor, Compensation, Consumer Goods, Consumer Product, Corporate Governance, Dividends & Buybacks, Food, Retail Tagged: HRL, SFD, TSN

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Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance

Linux

FontForge Design: Two is a party!

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FontForge can now allow multiple people to collaborate on designing a font in real time. This is all still rather alpha level code, and in fact the pull request including this code was only pushed over the fence in the last hour 😉 If real time collaboration sounds interesting to you, or something in this post seems of interest, then you might like to attend an upcoming Interactivos Workshop which is right after the Libre Graphics Meeting in Madrid (10-27 April).

At interactivos I will be expanding on the current collab code and discussing future directions and possible cross tool network specifications to allow different font tools to talk to each other. Even if you are not convinced that you want anyone else joining your collab session, you might like something like a Web sink watching your work and updating a page on your tablet as you modify the font so you can see in near real time if changes are going to work well on a target device and design or not. Why burden your workflow having to have your local fontforge export to an OTF and slow you down when a server can do all that for you in the background. There is no reason that the processes in the collab session can’t all be running on your behalf.

If you are running osx then I have a binary drop for you which bundles all the needed stuff for collab at:
http://fuuko.libferris.com/osx/packages/201303/05_1630/

To start a server select the menu item Collaborate/Start Session… a dialog will show you the IP address the server will run on so you can start fontforge on another computer (+other OS) and connect to that address using Collaborate/Connect to Session…

Things are in very early days and focus has been only on the glyph view. It seems that there is some fluff holding the undo system from working on the metrics view (thus on kerning etc).

The design uses FontForge’s undo/redo system to know what the changes are in the font, and since those changes can be serialized to an SFD format that code is reused to send and receive the undo information across a zeromq broadcast server.

The design is inline with the MCT (Merge Enabled Change Tracking) for ODF that is up on the OASIS lists. In FontForge’s case, s baseline full SFD snapshot and sequential fragments thereafter describing updates.

If you are compiling from sources then you’ll need czmq and zeromq version3 development stuff installed. Then grab master from github and enjoy.
https://github.com/fontforge/fontforge

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Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet KDE