This from Money Morning:

Research in Motion Ltd. (Nasdaq:RIMM) – maker of the ubiquitous BlackBerry – is likely to consolidate and increase its market share.

Almost all of our “Buy, Sell or Hold” recommended stocks started out on the right foot here in the New Year.  And our strategy of building up a position gradually up to year-end – to avoid the downward pressure of tax-loss selling, and other volatility – seems to have worked. This has left some cash on the sidelines to take advantage of any sell-offs that are sure to come in the first quarter.

In this environment, plagued with uncertainties, we are going to focus on companies that have bulletproof balance sheets (meaning they require no outside financing), enjoy a sustainable competitive advantage, regularly record high profit margins, and execute their strategies well.

The Waterloo, Ontario-based Research in Motion meets all of these requirements and pops up in our quantitative and qualitative screens prominently. And it helps a lot to have seen this Canadian company handily beat its third-quarter results.

RIMM has a solid, highly defensible franchise in its core market, the enterprise mobile phone segment. You see, the Blackberry line of smartphones has become the “must-have” gadget of managers in Corporate America. And not just because it’s a cool sign of corporate status – the phones are true productivity enhancers among corporate systems managers.

I called the experts just to verify this.  First, I queried a friend who runs systems for a Fortune 50 firm. For obvious reasons, my friend requested anonymity, both individually and for the company.

“If I had to implement a system now, the BlackBerry is the safest choice,” my friend explained.

And because the BlackBerry was specifically designed for this audience – a lucrative market segment – the device features many capabilities that just aren’t available in competing products. And if they are available, the features aren’t as well integrated into those rivaling devices.

To further buttress my research, I also called my good friend Brenda Lewis, a principal with the Greenwich, CT-based Transactions Marketing Inc., and a venture manager who has launched many mission-critical wireless businesses and who lives and breathes mobile phones.

Lewis is an independent thinker and isn’t “married” to any particular technology, and she was equally bullish: “RIMM has been innovative – ahead of IT officers’ requirements in security and in their ability to accommodate corporate applications.”

And not only did she confirm the technological edge and superior capabilities that the Blackberry platform has over the competition, she went on to elaborate on a market rumor that has been going around for some time – that Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq:MSFT) will buy RIMM.

“The probability of Microsoft acquiring RIMM is exceptionally low,” Lewis said.

I am not sure I concur, since the Windows and Blackberry market shares would comprise a very small percentage of the overall market.  Earlier in 2008 the market shares were hit by:

“lack of personal discretionary income in most markets.”
She was right.

Subsequently, industry researcher Gartner Inc. (NYSE:IT) predicted that global sales of mobile phones would dip between 1.0% and 4.0% – even with 308 million mobile phones being shipped in the third quarter. Gartner’s forecast was consistent with a forecast by IT researcher IDC.  IDC predicted a drop of more than 2% globally, despite a 9.0% sales pickup in smartphones for 2009.

But even in a generally cautious environment for wireless devices, this pickup in smartphone sales bodes well for the rulers of the space: Apple Inc. (Nasdaq:AAPL) and Research in Motion. Apple had been outpacing RIMM in sales the quarter before, but RIMM’s launching of three new “must have” Blackberry models should pay some major dividends. The BlackBerry Storm – RIMM’s first touch-screen smartphone – is a direct counterpunch to Apple’s iPhone 3G, which allegedly poses some security risks that become problematic in the corporate environment.  And the Storm, together with the BlackBerry Storm 9000 and the BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8220 will probably propel RIMM as the major market share gainer in the market in the current quarter, as evidenced by the success of the Storm on Black Friday.

In fact, with this early success already well underway, RIMM projected a large increase in revenue this quarter, to as much as $3.3 to $3.5 billion.  Both Apple and RIMM trail mobile device king Nokia Corp. (NYSE ADR:NOK) in market share. With its focus on the consumer – and not the corporate – market, Nokia leads the world with a 40% market share in the smartphone market, followed by Apple with 17% and Research in Motion with 15%.  So the bottom line for both Apple and RIMM is that they will gain market share from Nokia and other makers in a smartphone market that is growing at a 9.0% annual clip.
Research in Motion is poised to do very well for the follow reasons:

• It’s selling into a market segment that’s continuing to grow at a hefty single-digit pace.
• It is technologically dominant in the big-spending corporate market.
• It stands to boost its market share in both the overall smartphone segment and in the corporate segment.
• It has three new models on the market in the BlackBerry Storm the BlackBerry Storm 9000 and the BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8220 – which should enable it to snag additional market share.

All in all, these factors and others should enable Research in Motion should do well in this quarter, and throughout this year in general – despite the negative developments in the global economy.

RIMM shares bottomed at about $36 on Dec. 3, the day it downgraded its outlook. It has rallied some 20% from that quick bottom and has since been repeatedly testing these levels.  At these levels, the stock is already back to the range out of which it started 2007 and proceeded to log in a 250% climb.

Research in Motion shares closed Friday at $41.92, and have traded as high as $148.13 in the past 52 weeks.

So with all the aforementioned competitive advantages, the stock correction that seems to have run its course and a valuation that results in the lowest PEG (Price/Earnings to Earnings Growth Rate) ratio among its comparable peers (Apple, Nokia and Microsoft), RIMM is a compelling buy.

Recommendation: Buy RIMM shares immediately. But don’t purchase your entire intended position all at once. Leave some firepower to buy a second block of shares during a strong pullback in the stock or in the general market – should one occur – or after the company reports results from the current quarter.

Source: Buy, Sell or Hold: Research in Motion is Poised to Dial up Profits

The following is an excerpt from Bill Bonner and James Davidson’s crisis report, How to Survive and Prosper in the Coming Global Depression.

To read the full report, simply enter your e-mail address below. You’ll also begin receiving critical updates to the report via e-mail.

Contrarian Profits readers are probably familiar will Bill’s commentary from his Daily Reckoning column. But here is some information about James Davidson:

Davidson is a self-made multi-millionaire, venture capitalist and best-selling author.

His books include Blood in the Streets, Financial Reckoning Day and The Sovereign Individual.

As an author and editor of private financial advisory service Strategic Investment, Davidson has made a number of bull’s-eye crisis predictions.

He is the founder and chairman of the National Tax Payers Union, the largest and oldest grassroots taxpayer organization in US.

His forecasts and his war against taxes and deficits have earned him frequent invitations on programs such as Good Morning America, The Tonight Show and MacNeil-Lehrer.

Read on…

This Is a ‘Credit Cycle’ Bust

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It is simply too painful to acknowledge — even to ourselves — that we’ve been so credulous.

We turn here to the words of American astronomer Carl Sagan because they so aptly describe our current economic predicament.

Americans have come to believe the particular bamboozle that we can get rich by spending…that we can get something for nothing.

As Bill put it in Financial Day of Reckoning, “Americans can no more retreat from this dream than Napoleon could have brought his troops back from Germany, Italy and Spain and renounced his empire.”

And here’s where our story gets really interesting.

Panics do not destroy capital; they merely reveal the extent to which it has been previously destroyed by its betrayal into hopelessly unproductive works.

- John Stuart Mill

Because what becomes clear is that this is no ordinary collapse.

Let us explain…

When left to themselves, the markets are natural phenomena. There is a wonderful simplicity about them.

Failure follows success. What goes up eventually comes down. Like a tree, they cannot continue to grow forever.

We can easily illustrate this by describing the pattern of pig farmers.

When the price of pigs rises, pig farmers naturally raise new pigs to increase production. About 18 months later, these new creatures arrive on the market. This increase in supply causes prices to fall. Farmers decide to cut back, which caused prices to rise again.

This is nothing more than the cyclical boom-and-bust cycle that defined the US economy from the end of World War II to 2001.

Then something changed radically. The Fed, under eager-to-please chairman Alan Greenspan, decided it could avoid the bust part of the cycle altogether.

The result is a different beast from your garden-variety downturn. You get a “credit cycle” bust instead.

This is exactly what we are experiencing now. And it’s more like the post-bubble depression of the 1930s than the downturn of 1973 to 1974 or 1981 to 1982…

‘Catastrophic Acceleration’ of Losses

Here’s the big worry.

The severity of this kind of bust depends on the magnitude of the bubble that preceded it. And the bubble that came before this bust was the biggest ever in history.

In fact, it wasn’t really a bubble at all. It was a “hyper-bubble.”

Now this hyper-bubble has popped, and the losses are catastrophic.

Billionaire investor George Soros recently explained just how dangerous the unwinding of these kinds of bubbles can be.

The typical sequence of boom and bust has an asymmetric shape. The boom develops slowly and accelerates gradually. The bust, when it occurs, tends to be short and sharp.

The asymmetry is due to the role that credit plays. As prices rise, the same collateral can support a greater amount of credit. Rising prices also tend to generate optimism and encourage a greater use of leverage — borrowing for investment purposes.

At the peak of the boom both the value of the collateral and the degree of leverage reach a peak.

When the price trend is reversed, participants are vulnerable to margin calls and, as we’ve seen in 2008, the forced liquidation of collateral leads to a catastrophic acceleration on the downside.

Of course, all this was inevitable.

Bill repeatedly warned the more than half a million subscribers of his newsletter, The Daily Reckoning.

No doubt, many got tired of hearing his warnings. But all he was doing was pointing out the obvious.

******************************************************************************************************

Audio Commentary from Resource Investor Rick Rule

Click to play with Media Player

Key points summary:

* The crisis is not limited to mortgages… Financial institutions are over leveraged
* There is a wipe out of shareholder equity in financial services
* Financial service companies don’t know what their derivatives are worth
* They are keeping liquidity for themselves because they don’t know value of derivatives of others banks
* The US is the leading edge of a worldwide trend of over-leveraged financial services
* An extreme example of over-leverage is Iceland

Rick Rule is chairman of Global Resource Investments. He has dedicated his life to all aspects of the natural resource industry. His contacts and knowledge of this market are unmatched.

*******************************************************************************************************

A Monster of Deleveraging

Instead of getting a typical bear market in 2001, we now face a monster of deleveraging as the biggest credit boom in history unwinds.

Deleveraging is simply the cutting back on the amount of money borrowed compared to equity.

In the case of this crisis, financial institutions sell off assets to recoup losses inflicted on their balance sheets by toxic mortgage-related securities.

These forced sales push down asset prices, hurting the balance sheets of other investors, forcing more asset sales and so on.

Nothing can stop this process. It’s a necessary cure for the credit bubble that Greenspan puffed up.

The problem is it is devastating the wider economy.

As The Economist magazine puts it, “What hurts finance affects the rest of the economy in spades.”

Because of leverage, a shortfall of bank capital of around $100 billion may reduce the potential supply of credit by $1 trillion.

This assumes banking system leveraging of around ten times…the geniuses running Lehman Brothers leveraged 25 times to equity.

But let’s assume that leverage of ten times to equity is about right.

So far, financial institutions have admitted to about $600 billion in credit-related losses and writedowns (net of re-capitalization via new equity issues).

This means cuts of $4 to $6 trillion to the potential supply of credit.

This, in turn, leads to higher cost and lower availability of credit to the real economy. And it forces consumers to reduce debt and consumption, most of which was based on borrowing in the first place.

This is bad enough. But it doesn’t end there…

So-called “negative feedback loops” mean the reductions in consumer spending and investment further hurt the economy. This puts further financial stress on corporations and individuals and triggers more debt defaults and more losses for the financial system. These then reduce lending capacity.

And so on…

Like a giant forest fire, the deleveraging process can’t be extinguished.

And although the government believes it can put the fire out with bonehead bailouts, at the very best all it can do is create firebreaks that limit the damage until the fire burns itself out.

Right now, the bailouts are stopping companies such AIG and Citigroup from going under. But banks are still refusing to lend to each other despite all the money the government is giving them.

The bottom line?

This massive unwinding is nowhere near finished.

Remember, Wall Street has only admitted to a small fraction of its mortgage-related losses and writedowns.

And the very, very bad news is total losses are estimated to clock in at $2.5 to $3 trillion…

PS. To read the rest of this report, simply enter your e-mail address below. You’ll also begin receiving critical updates to the report via e-mail.

This from Daily Reckoning:

Financial markets are part of public life. As a consequence they follow the rules of all public spectacles. That is, they are one part rational and sensible… one part incomprehensible… and one part pure humbug. You never know exactly which part it is you’re looking at.

But the markets are also moral, not mechanical. That is, they follow moral rules, such as – Thou Shalt Buy Low and Sell High… Thou Shalt Save Thy Money… Thou Shalt Not Speculate Unless Thou Knowest Exactly What Thou Art Doing.

Break those commandments… and you’re on the road to money Hell. No point in tinkering with the machine. You can’t ‘fix’ it. That’s just the way it works. Financial sins are punished, one way or another.

But moral lessons – as opposed to mechanical knowledge – are cyclical, rather than cumulative. One generation learns. The next forgets. That’s why the biggest market trends tend to follow great, long cycles – approximately generational in length. In 1929, for example, stocks hit a generational high. They didn’t recover until 1954 – 25 years later. They reached a peak in 1966… and then declined until 1982. They didn’t reach another major peak until 2000 – 34 years later.

We all know what has happened since. The market tried to correct in 2001-2002, but the feds wouldn’t let it. They inflated the biggest bubble of credit and speculation in history…

…that bubble has just burst.

What now? Well, we can expect a long period of regret, reorganizing and repentance. It takes time to undo mistakes. It takes time to learn. It takes time to correct the errors of a 25-year bull market.

If the real top of the bull market cycle came in 2000, we will probably see the next peak around 2025. Meanwhile, there is a dark valley to cross.

But wait… there’s more.

Because while the private economy is reluctantly owning up to its mistakes… going into rehab… making amends… rebuilding balance sheets…. and promising never to do such stupid things again…

…our leaders are doing all they can to stop the learning process.

“Here’s $800 billion,” was yesterday’s temptation. “Go out and have a good time.”

“Rescue, Part 2” is how the International Herald Tribune describes it. The plan itself has two features. In the first, the feds will spend $200 billion to buy up loans made to consumers and small business. In the second, another $600 billion will be offered to the mortgage industry.

Meanwhile, the Europeans don’t want to be left behind:

“The European Commission urged EU governments Wednesday to jointly combat the economic slowdown with euro200 billion (US$256.22 billion) in spending and tax cuts to boost growth and consumer and business confidence.

“If fully enacted, its two-year “European Economic Recovery Plan” would see the 27 EU governments spend 1.5 percent of the bloc’s gross domestic product to halt the slowdown that has already pushed some European nations into recession.”

But let’s not get distracted by the details. The markets are teaching people a lesson. The feds don’t like it. They want people to believe that the economy is a mechanical system… that they just need to find the right screws to turn… and the right levers to pull.

Since the “machine” is visibly slowing down, these simpletons think they can get it going again. Just add more fuel!

Of course, as we saw in 2001-2007, the feds can certainly have a big effect on the economy. Their “economy as a machine” theory often seems to work. In fact, practically everyone believes it will work. They just argue about which screw to turn… and who should do the screwing.

The Keynesians say you turn the screw marked “fiscal policy.” When private spending slumps, just replace it with government spending. Pretty simple, no? But when the feds turned that screw – arguably, too far – in the ‘60s and ‘70s, it didn’t seem to work. Instead, they got stagflation.

So, Milton Friedman pointed to the lever marked “monetary policy.” Give that a pull, he said. It will make sure that the economy always has just the right amount of credit at just the right price. So, Maggie Thatcher and Ronald Reagan both pulled on the monetary policy lever. And Alan Greenspan swore by it. He yanked it so hard in the recession of 2001-2002, the handle practically broke off. Milton Friedman was still alive at the time and actually approved of Greenspan’s handiwork, saying that he had ‘spared the economy a worse recession,’ or words to that effect.

Now the machine has broken down again. It has thrown itself into reverse; the 3rd quarter showed an absolute decline in US output – and it’s speeding up in the wrong direction! And now the terrified feds are ‘pulling out all the stops.’ Which means they using both Keynes and Friedman, and every other tool they can get their hands on.

But the real problem is this: the “economy as a machine” theory is much too simple. No theory, said the philosopher Godel, is ever complete. In science, each one is a stepping stone, towards a fuller and more complete theory. Even theories that take you in the wrong direction are useful – at least in science. They are eliminated… and discarded, so science can take a new direction.

In economics, no theory is ever discarded. Instead, they are merely recycled as market conditions change. “Markets make opinions,” say the old timers. In a boom, it is the free market theories everyone wants. “Leave the market alone… it will take care of itself,” they say. But in a bust, the cry goes up: “Help!”

For the moment, Mr. Market’s correction still dominates the economy. One way or another, it will continue for many years. But the Feds are turning the screws and pulling on the levers. Keynes is in fashion… for the present. But Friedman is still around too. Between the lot of them, they ought to be able to do some spectacular damage

But there is plenty of room for surprises… and more mischief from the feds. At some point, we presume the feds will succumb to the lure of the printing press. By some accounts, they already have. Then, we’ll really see some excitement.

So, enjoy your Thanksgiving turkey… and stay tuned.

Source: Correcting The Errors Of A 25-Year Bull Market