Investment "Logic"

Ok, so I've fallen a bit behind on things so there will be a bunch of these coming fast and furious.  The first one I'm going to address it On Semiconductor. On reported a couple weeks ago now with results that beat street expectations of $0.09 by $0.04 for earnings of $0.13 per share.  This is a pretty handy beat, considering the impacts of the Thai floods on some of the Factories ONNN recently acquired from Sanyo.  The 4th quarter was riddled with closed factories and shifting work streams from those factories to other locations.  If there's any kind of positive to take from this event and the pains it put on the company, it'd be the fact that these issues happened at a time when product cycles were actually near their worst.  Customers had a glut of product and demand was lower than normal over the last half of the year, but is now seen to be picking up and falling into normal cycles again - just in time for ONNN to have all of their facilities up and ready...

This week I'm going to cover the earnings call for Honeywell (HON).  They reported 4Q and fiscal year 2011 numbers as well as guidance for 2012 on Friday.  While I was at my real job seeing headlines, you'd swear Honeywell reported something unfavorable.  Surprisingly, based on the headlines alone, the stock was up throughout the majority of the day, though.  I looked forward to hearing what all was said on the call because it's been noted in other teachings that headlines can be misleading.  My findings?  This quarter, and the full year, was nothing less than stellar in my opinion. Headlines stated that Honeywell reported a net loss in the fourth quarter.  This is actually true, but that loss is only after a large sum was taken out for pension funding.  Honeywell's numbers are truly based on a proforma (before pension funding) basis and they earned $1.05 per share.  This was the very top end of estimate as was their fiscal year numbers, ...

Today I begin my assessments of conference calls for quarters ending Dec 2011.  Last week, Citigroup announced their Q4 earnings.  Let's go through and see what a rookie like me notices.  This isn't the first conference call I've listened to, but this is the first one I'm going to try to articulate for my own memory as well as to share with others. Want a definition of a bad quarter?  Look no further than the results from Citigroup this last Monday as they reported $0.39 per share earnings - 22% below estimates of $0.49/share, 5% below Q4 earnings for 2010 and a whopping 53.5% below Q3 earnings.  Talk about a stinker!  But that's just a broad summary, so let's actually try to get into good and bad things I heard in this last quarter's conference call. I'll start with the bad things today since there are so many.  I already stated the poor earnings, but why were they so poor?  Here are some of the things I noted.  First, I find it amazing ...