stock prices

T. ROWE PRICE GROUP INC. $71 (Nasdaq symbol TROW; Aggressive Growth Portfolio, Finance sector; Shares outstanding: 256.2 million; Market cap: $18.2 billion; Priceto- sales ratio: 4.2; Dividend yield: 2.9%; TSINetwork Rating: Average; www.troweprice.com) earned $1.24 a share in the second quarter of 2015, up 9.7% from $1.13 a year earlier. Revenue gained 10.2%, to $942.2 million from $855.3 million. On June 30, 2015, the company had $773.0 billion of assets under management, up 3.5% from $746.8 billion at the end of 2014.

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The drop in the stock market in the past few weeks is spurring renewed interest in market timing—the practice of trying to predict future trends and turning points in stock prices. For most people, this is wasted if not harmful effort. Random events tend to occur in bunches. Market timing generates a lot of random buy and sell signals, and some are bound to work out well. But few work out well enough to offset losses on the inevitable erroneous signals, and leave a decent profit besides. Instead of trying to master market timing, you are far better off to study the earmarks of successful investments. Your long-term investment results will improve a great deal if you simply learn to spot and recognize these earmarks, and understand how they differ from the common risk factors in unsuccessful investments....

Typically, changes to the indexes are announced a couple weeks before they come into effect. Some academics have analyzed past price movements and concluded that after the announcement is made and before the effective date, stock prices typically rise for companies added to indexes and fall for those that are dropped. After the effective date, however, the studies show that the price changes mostly reverse themselves. The added firms give up some gains and the deleted firms recover nearly all of the ground they lost....

To know how to trade stocks successfully, you need to know the right time to sell stocks. Here’s our advice.

There are two basic approaches to investing in stocks: bottom-up and top-down. Bottom-up investing is the better of the two by far.

In March 2015, Kraft Foods soared 40% on news of its merger with ketchup maker Heinz. Speculation about more deals in the food business has also boosted the shares of the four companies below. So far, their earnings haven’t kept up with their stock prices — though we still see two of them as buys. MONDELEZ INTERNATIONAL INC. $40 (Nasdaq symbol MDLZ; Conservative Growth Portfolio, Consumer sector; Shares outstanding: 1.6 billion; Market cap: $64.0 billion; Price-to-sales ratio: 2.0; Dividend yield: 1.5%; TSINetwork Rating: Above Average; www.mondelezinternational.com) makes cookies and biscuits (Oreo, Chips Ahoy, Ritz), chocolate bars (Cadbury, Toblerone) and gum and candy (Trident, Chiclets and Halls cough drops). In May 2014, the company agreed to merge its packaged coffee business with European coffee maker D.E. Master Blenders. Under the deal, Mondelez will contribute its coffee brands, including Jacobs, Gevalia and Tassimo, to a new firm called Jacobs Douwe Egberts. It will get about $4.5 billion in cash and 49% of the new company in return....

Learning how to “time the market” is an impossible goal, at least on any consistent basis. If you knew how to time the market, you could routinely cash in on coming price trends in individual stocks, or the market as a whole. If so, you could, as the saying goes, “Make all the money in the world.” If this was humanly possible, somebody would have done it by now, in view of the many who have tried. You can get lucky from time to time, of course. But trying to time the market will wind up costing you money in the long run. Eventually, any market-timing skill you thought you had will fail you. It will often do so when it can hurt you most....

MAPLE LEAF FOODS INC. $23 (Toronto symbol MFI; Conservative Growth Portfolio, Consumer sector; Shares outstanding: 143.1 million; Market cap: $3.3 billion; Price-to-sales ratio: 1.0; Dividend yield: 1.4%; TSINetwork Rating: Average; www.mapleleaf.ca) is Canada’s largest food processing company. It mainly sells its products, including fresh and prepared meats and poultry, under the Maple Leaf and Schneider brands.

Maple Leaf is close to finishing an overhaul of its meat-processing operations that mainly involves closing older plants and shifting their operations to newer facilities. It has also cut the number of warehouses in its distribution business from 19 to two.

The company is beginning to benefit from this plan: in the three months ended March 31, 2015, it lost $2.9 million, or $0.02 a share, compared to a year-ago loss of $132.9 million, or $0.95. If you exclude restructuring costs, Maple Leaf earned $0.05 a share in the latest quarter.

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MAPLE LEAF FOODS INC. $23 (Toronto symbol MFI; Conservative Growth Portfolio, Consumer sector; Shares outstanding: 143.1 million; Market cap: $3.3 billion; Price-to-sales ratio: 1.0; Dividend yield: 1.4%; TSINetwork Rating: Average; www.mapleleaf.ca) is Canada’s largest food processing company. It mainly sells its products, including fresh and prepared meats and poultry, under the Maple Leaf and Schneider brands. Maple Leaf is close to finishing an overhaul of its meat-processing operations that mainly involves closing older plants and shifting their operations to newer facilities. It has also cut the number of warehouses in its distribution business from 19 to two. The company is beginning to benefit from this plan: in the three months ended March 31, 2015, it lost $2.9 million, or $0.02 a share, compared to a year-ago loss of $132.9 million, or $0.95. If you exclude restructuring costs, Maple Leaf earned $0.05 a share in the latest quarter....

One of the more reassuring aspects of today’s stock market is that investors generally are uneasy. They are apt to sell and push prices down on very slight provocation. After that, prices seem to go back up again. Last week, for instance, U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen was having a conversation with International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde before an audience at IMF headquarters in Washington. Ms. Lagarde asked Ms. Yellen about the possibility that the Fed’s rock-bottom interest-rate policy would lead to bubbles in financial markets. Ms. Yellen started out by saying, “I would highlight that equity-market valuations at this point generally are quite high”. Then, perhaps realizing that this comment could have unfortunate repercussions on the stock market, Ms. Yellen added, “Not so high when you compare returns on equity to returns on safe assets like bonds, which are also very low, but there are potential dangers there.”...