Adobe Inc.

DUNDEEWEALTH INC., $14.78, symbol DW on Toronto, manages investments and operates a brokerage business. The company also owns the Dynamic family of mutual funds, and provides financial-planning and investment advice. DundeeWealth has raised its quarterly dividend by 100%, to $0.07 per share from $0.035. The shares now yield 1.9%. The company had already raised its dividend by 75%, to $0.035 per share from $0.02 with the October 2009 payment. DundeeWealth is still a buy....

Members of our Inner Circle service often ask for investing advice on stocks they are thinking of buying that we don’t cover in our newsletters. A large number of these stocks fall into a grey area. Sometimes our investing advice is that they are “okay to hold,” but we wouldn’t advise buying them. When Inner Circle members ask about one of these companies, that’s what our investing advice would be: it’s “okay to hold.” However, when Inner Circle members ask about companies we think they should sell (or avoid if they don’t already own them), we say so. Here are three recent examples of our Inner Circle investing advice: Day4 Energy (symbol DFE on Toronto) designs and makes solar panels using its patented electrode technology and silicon cells....

ADOBE SYSTEMS INC. $35 (Nasdaq symbol ADBE; Aggressive Growth Portfolio, Manufacturing & Industry sector; Shares outstanding: 524.1 million; Market cap: $18.3 billion; Price-to-sales ratio: 6.0; No dividends paid since June 2005; WSSF Rating: Average) makes Abode Acrobat, which lets users easily create, edit and share electronic documents in the popular PDF format. As well, graphic designers use Adobe’s Creative Suite of programs to create web pages and print publications. The company also makes Adobe Flash. This program lets web sites display graphics and animation. In October 2009, Adobe completed its $1.8-billion purchase of Omniture Inc., which makes software that measures and analyzes web-site traffic. Adobe will sell this software to its customers, who can use the information it provides to improve their web pages and increase their online ad revenues. Omniture will add around $335 million a year to Adobe’s revenue. Adobe earned $814.7 million, or $1.54 a share, in the year ended November 27, 2009. That’s down 28.3% from $1.1 billion, or $2.07 a share, in the prior year. These figures exclude several unusual items, including costs related to the Omniture purchase. Revenue fell 17.7%, to $2.9 billion from $3.6 billion....

An improving global economy should push up software sales in 2010. As well, software makers typically earn higher profit margins than other technology companies, so even a modest sales increase would sharply lift these companies’ earnings. Even so, the software industry remains highly volatile. To cut your risk, you should stick with well-established software companies, such as these four. All are market leaders, and have the financial strength to keep improving their products and developing new ones. Still, we only see three as buys right now. MICROSOFT CORP. $29 (Nasdaq symbol MSFT; Aggressive Growth Portfolio, Manufacturing & Industry sector; Shares outstanding: 8.8 billion; Market cap: $255.2 billion; Price-to-sales ratio: 4.2; Dividend yield: 1.8%; WSSF Rating: Above Average) is the world’s largest software company. Its Windows operating system runs 90% of the world’s computers. As well, the company’s Office suite of programs dominates the business-software field. Together, Windows and Office account for 60% of Microsoft’s revenue and 80% of its earnings....

Akamai Technologies Inc., $25.18, symbol AKAM on Nasdaq (Shares outstanding: 171.3 million; Market cap: $4.3 billion), helps companies improve the performance of their web sites. Its customers include Amazon.com, Adobe Systems, Apple, Microsoft and Yahoo. Akamai is a Hawaiian word meaning smart or intelligent. Akamai mirrors a customer’s web site onto its own network of servers, which are located in over 70 countries. That speeds up download times and cuts the risk of Internet outages or slowdowns, because users can access the closest server, or the one with the best connection. Demand for Akamai’s services continues to rise, particularly as more people use the Internet to view videos. The company gets 28% of its revenue from customers outside of the U.S....

SYMANTEC CORP. $18.71 (Nasdaq symbol SYMC; SI Rating: Average) (1-408-517-8000; www.symantec.com; Shares outstanding: 810.6 million; Market cap: $15.2 billion; No dividends paid) makes software that protects computers from viruses and electronic attacks. The popular Norton anti-virus program is its best-known product. In the three months ended October 2, 2009, Symantec earned $294 million, or $0.36 a share. That’s down 5.8% from $312 million, or $0.37 a share, a year earlier. These figures exclude non-recurring items, such as the cost of integrating companies Symantec bought, and writedowns of buildings it plans to sell. Despite the drop, the latest earnings beat the $0.33 a share that analysts were expecting. That was entirely because of the company’s cost cuts, as its revenue fell 2.9%, to $1.47 billion from $1.52 billion....

CEDAR FAIR L.P., $11.16, New York symbol FUN, jumped nearly 25% this week after the company accepted an $11.50-a-unit takeover offer from Apollo Global Management, a private equity firm. If Cedar Fair unitholders approve, the sale should close by April 2010. Cedar Fair owns 11 amusement parks, six outdoor water parks, one indoor water park and five hotels, mostly in the midwestern and northeastern U.S. The slow economy has hurt Cedar Fair’s earnings. As well, it recently suspended distributions to conserve cash for debt repayments. The units are currently trading about 3% below the offer. This indicates that investors don’t expect a higher offer....

NEW GOLD, $3.77, symbol NGD on Toronto, is reopening its Cerro San Pedro mine in Mexico after a Mexican court granted an injunction against a mining-suspension order from the Mexican environmental protection agency. The mine accounts for about one-third of New Gold’s 290,000 ounces per year of gold production. Cerro San Pedro has long been the subject of disputes with local groups and environmentalists, who claim it is harming a historically important area. They also argue that the operation threatens local watersheds....

GABRIEL RESOURCES, $3.35, symbol GBU on Toronto, shot up over 30% this week after it added a new investor with experience in permitting and building large industrial projects in Romania. That’s where Gabriel’s 80.23%-owned Rosia Montana project is located. Rosia Montana contains an estimated 10 million ounces of gold reserves, and could produce over 500,000 ounces a year. This gives it the potential to become Europe’s largest producing gold mine. BSG Capital Markets, a unit of Beny Steinmetz Group, a privately owned holding company, is buying 30 million units of Gabriel at $2.25 each (or a total of $67.5 million). Aside from one common share, each unit includes a two-year warrant that entitles BSG to buy additional Gabriel stock. For the first 18 months, BSG may buy Gabriel shares for $2.50 each. The price rises to $3.00 a share for the final six months....

ADOBE SYSTEMS INC., $32.95, Nasdaq symbol ADBE, will buy Omniture Inc. (Nasdaq symbol OMTR), which makes software that measures and analyzes web-site traffic. The deal will close later this year. Omniture’s software tracks the pages that site visitors view, as well as the links they click. Omniture’s 5,000 clients use this information to improve their sites, and to help determine how much to charge advertisers. Adobe makes web-design software, which it plans to modify to take advantage of Omniture’s online-marketing expertise. This should help Adobe’s customers increase their ad revenues....