By Herb Greenberg
The day it went public in 2013, Potbelly (PBPB) might have had the best single-day jump of any restaurant chain... It has been downhill ever since for the sandwich chain, as the company once hailed as "the next Chipotle" started looking more like a burrito without any filling. After going public at $14 per share […]
By Herb Greenberg
During the boom, you would be lucky to get yourself on a wait list for a new home, even starting in the millions – let alone get one – here in Southern California... They couldn't build them fast enough. But as the longtime sales manager for one SoCal developer told me the other day, using […]
By Herb Greenberg
Back when I was with the short-biased research firm I had co-founded, we were trying to sell a major hedge fund on our work... I was talking with the co-chief investment officer ("CIO"), who asked what made our firm different. I explained that I was a former journalist and my business partner was a forensic […]
By Herb Greenberg
Random Musing No. 1 – I bought out my lease on my car over the weekend... This Mercedes SUV has been the best car I've owned and there's no reason to replace it... especially given the state of the auto market, which remains a seller's market. Plus, no way am I paying those absurdly ridiculous […]
By Herb Greenberg
When Jim Cramer lured me away from newspapers to join TheStreet.com in 1998, people thought I was making a mistake... I was one of the first somewhat high-profile print journalists to make the shift to online from print... leaving a six-day-a-week column I had written for 10 years at the San Francisco Chronicle for a […]
By Herb Greenberg
I call it the 'meet-or-beat game'... This is when companies do whatever it takes to meet or beat analyst estimates. The trouble is, like any drug, there's a danger of getting addicted to doing whatever it takes to avoid losing that high. And pretty soon, rather than running a business for the sake of running […]
By Herb Greenberg
With the market rising, if you are heavily invested enough to have seen your retirement account get clobbered, it's easy to wipe the sweat from your brow and think you just survived something horrible... But only a fool would think the worst is over... That's why I'm dusting off something I first wrote in 1995 […]
By Herb Greenberg
I've known smart people on both sides of the Carvana (CVNA) trade – investors who were long and short... Anybody long – for a good part of four years – made a bundle on the online used-car retailer, which is known for its multistory car vending machines. But as the company's results and near-round trip […]
By Herb Greenberg
Editor's note: The Empire Financial Research offices are closed on Monday in observance of Independence Day. Look for your next issue of Empire Financial Daily on Tuesday, after the Weekend Edition. There's a broad consensus that 'you ain't seen nothing yet' when it comes to this market... Everybody has a reason... higher interest rates, the […]
By Herb Greenberg
There's a saying that I was thinking about the other day when I was reading a story in the Wall Street Journal... "Reaching for yield." That's when, for the sake of making even a little more on a supposedly conservative fixed- income investment, you buy something with a higher yield. But with higher yield comes […]
By Herb Greenberg
Editor's note: The Empire Financial Research offices are closed on Monday in observance of Juneteenth. Look for the next Empire Financial Daily in your inbox on Tuesday, June 21, after the Weekend Edition. There's a place to turn if you ever want to know the motive of public company fraud or aggressive accounting or stretched […]
By Herb Greenberg
It's a question you hear over and over again... Is the U.S. Federal Reserve out of touch with the average American? There may be something to it, at least based on my first-hand experience... This was years ago – many years, in fact (back in the late 1980s) – but I'm willing to bet it's […]
By Herb Greenberg
If you take drugs for anything chronic, you'll fully understand what I'm about to say... When I saw the recent news that the Federal Trade Commission ("FTC") was going to investigate pharmacy benefit managers ("PBMs"), I thought, "It's about time." Talk about cartels... In the murky world of drug pricing, the PBMs are the middlemen […]
By Herb Greenberg
A recent move by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ('SEC') is coming not a moment too soon... Specifically, the agency is on the scene to focus on bogus claims of environmental, social, and governance ("ESG") by mutual funds, exchange-traded funds ("ETFs"), and other investment vehicles. The SEC is purportedly planning to crack down on […]
By Herb Greenberg
There's something about this market... You could see what happened coming many miles away, long before the bottom fell out. With that being the case, why did so many investors – some really smart ones among them – miss it? The answer is simple: the "human factor." I blame a lot of things on the […]
By Herb Greenberg
On a drive back from the airport last week, our driver – knowing that I do what I do – asked the one question that everybody seems to be asking these days... "Are we in a recession?" Outside of anything inflation-related, that seems to be the topic du jour. My answer to him was what […]
By Herb Greenberg
Here's something that somehow fell through the holes of grabbing headlines, but shows just how desperate some companies are to 'make' their numbers... It all has to do with something at quarter-end that was called "the art of the close" at Rollins (ROL), which owns the Orkin exterminating company. And it's everything you hear about […]
By Herb Greenberg
The tale of this stock is also a tale of this market, filled with irony and luck... I call it the "Tale of the TUP"... I'm talking about Tupperware Brands (TUP), the company whose iconic brand has become the Kleenex of plastic storage containers. Last week, Tupperware reported extremely disappointing first-quarter results – so bad […]
By Herb Greenberg
One hallmark of the past (fill in the blank) years is that some investors only know a world in which stocks go straight up... And that every dip is a buying opportunity in every stock. It goes for private companies, too – perhaps especially private companies, with so many born-in-a-bull-market entrepreneurs confusing brains with a […]
By Herb Greenberg
Warren Buffett stated the obvious at Berkshire Hathaway's (BRK-B) annual meeting over the weekend when he said the markets have become a 'gambling parlor'... The reality is, they've always been. After all, the saying "play the market" has been around forever... It's Wall Street's version of "playing the ponies." The difference this time was the […]
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Each month, editor Whitney Tilson taps into his two decades of experience on Wall Street to recommend a world-class investment opportunity to help Empire Stock Investor readers safely grow their wealth.
