HEWLETT-PACKARD CO. $12 - New York symbol HPQ

HEWLETT-PACKARD CO. $12 (New York symbol HPQ; Conservative Growth Portfolio, Manufacturing & Industry sector; Shares outstanding: 2.0 billion; Market cap: $24.0 billion; Price-to-sales ratio: 0.2; Dividend yield: 4.4%; TSINetwork Rating: Above Average; www.hp.com) paid $11.1 billion in August 2011 for U.K.-based Autonomy Corp., which makes software that helps businesses organize information in a variety of formats, including email, web pages and documents.

The company now claims that improper accounting policies made Autonomy look more profitable that it really was. As a result, it wrote down the value of this purchase by $8.8 billion. Hewlett will try to recover some of these losses through lawsuits.

However, that could take years. As well, sales of the company’s computers and printers continue to decline as consumers shift to tablet computers.

Hewlett-Packard is now a hold.

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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.

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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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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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