Financial TV News Monitoring, Stock Reports, Investment Information and Analysis from Ockham Research

The Kindle has been a hit thus far and has the potential to dominate the digital book market the way the iPod has for digital music. We all know how that has worked out for Apple (AAPL) in the last decade. Not to mention, Amazon's ecommerce site has never been hotter and should be a major destination for holiday shoppers.

The day of the Citi upgrade all homebuilder stocks got a boost despite much worse than expected housing starts data. However, Pulte has already given all of those short lived gains back and then some in just two trading days. Clearly, this is one stock that both Ockham and Cramer agree cannot be bought at this time, and the upgrade from Citi is odd and lacks any bite.

We have The Gap as Fairly Valued coming into this report, and even though the quarter was a good one, we are unlikely to upgrade it in our next rating. The stock is in negative territory after hours following the report, which is a bit of a surprise. With earnings in-line, costs down, revenue and margins better than expected, it would seem an overall successful quarter.

Bloomberg opinion columnist Jonathan Weil has a talent for navigating balance sheets of often complex financial firms. In his latest piece, he writes about Wells Fargo (WFC), the bank who rejected the idea that it needed TARP funds in the first place, yet has to date neglected to repay the government for the loan. It is an interesting point as many investors, including a big one out of Omaha, have bought the stock of Wells Fargo because it held the mantle of conservative management among the too big to fail set.

Bank of America contends that Intel and others have been shipping a greater number of CPU's than PC's that have been shipped, which suggests there is ample supply of chips to accommodate any build in PC demand. The note went on to say that unless there was a sharp upturn in the economy there is a possibility of an inventory correction. This scenario has skewed the risk-reward negatively and prompted the downgrades.

This post shares some great data compiled by The New York times comparing the two global economic powerhouses. There is nothing ground breaking here but it is a great visual of what has happened in under a decade.