AMEREN CORP. $23 - New York symbol AEE;

AMEREN CORP. $23 (New York symbol AEE; Income Portfolio, Utilities sector; Shares outstanding: 213.6 million; Market cap: $4.9 billion; Price-to-sales ratio: 0.6; WSSF Rating: Average) provides electricity and natural gas to 3.4 million customers in Illinois and Missouri. Ameren has faced a number of challenges recently. The recession has driven down electricity demand, and a warmer-than-usual winter hurt natural-gas sales. As well, a severe ice storm in January forced Ameren’s biggest power customer, an aluminum smelter in Missouri, to scale back its operations. As a result, Ameren’s earnings in the first quarter of 2009 fell 14.9%, to $114 million, or $0.54 a share. The company earned $134 million, or $0.64 a share, a year earlier. These figures exclude one-time items, including losses of $0.14 a share on futures contracts that Ameren uses to lock in its fuel costs. Revenue fell 7.9%, to $1.9 billion from $2.1 billion. To conserve cash, Ameren cut its quarterly dividend by 39.4%, to $0.385 a share from $0.635. The new annual rate of $1.54 yields 6.7%. The cut will free up about $215 million a year. Ameren’s stock trades at 8.1 times its likely 2009 earnings of $2.83 a share. Ameren is a hold.

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Blue Chip Stocks

Blue chip stocks are big, well-established, dividend-paying corporations with strong business prospects. These are companies that also have sound management that should be able to make the right moves to keep competing successfully in a changing marketplace.

Dividend Stocks

Dividend stocks make cash payouts that serve as a way for companies to share the wealth they’ve accumulated. These payouts are drawn from earnings and cash flow and paid to the shareholders of the company. Typically, these dividends are paid quarterly, although they may be paid annually or even monthly as well.

Value Stocks

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One of the sweetest and most profitable pleasures of successful investing is to buy high-quality “value stocks” (or stocks that are reasonably priced, if not cheap, in relation to its sales, earnings or assets), then hold on to them as mainstream investors recognize the value and push up the share price.

Growth Stocks

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AI Investing

Artificial intelligence (AI) is essentially the merging of today’s big computing with big data. This has resulted in breakthroughs in everything from creating machines to recognize faces with more accuracy than a human, to the development of chatbots able to collect, organize and simplify all the Internet has to say on any topic.

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A penny stock in general trades for under five dollars a share, and as the name implies, sometimes for pennies. Most of the time they’re young companies, or start-ups in speculative markets like mining or technology.

Mining Stocks

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