wall street

DOW JONES & CO. $34 (New York symbol DJ; Conservative Growth Portfolio, Consumer sector; WSSF Rating: Above average) publishes The Wall Street Journal and Barron’s magazine. It also owns several smaller publications, and provides newswire and specialized information services. The company has suffered in this decade, like all publishers, from fiercer competition for ads. Its profits have stagnated in the past five years, although sales have risen from $1.56 billion in 2002 to a likely level of $1.9 billion or so this year. The stock now trades at 30.9 times its forecast 2006 profit of $1.10 a share. The $1.00 dividend yields 2.9%. Dow Jones is doing a good job of controlling its costs, which gives it more cash to expand faster- growing businesses such as Internet sites. Its latest restructuring plan should save it $15 million a year, mainly by streamlining management and outsourcing more administrative functions....

Demand for financial and business information is ballooning. A great deal of this information is available for free on the Internet, but users have doubts about its accuracy. So they are willing to pay for data they can trust from reputable sources, such as these four top providers of specialized business information. Investors see a lot of value and long-term growth potential in these companies. That helps explain why they often trade at above-average p/e ratios (the S&P 500’s p/e is currently 17.4).We see only two of these stocks as buys right now. DOW JONES & CO. $34 (New York symbol DJ; Conservative Growth Portfolio, Consumer sector; WSSF Rating: Above average) publishes The Wall Street Journal and Barron’s magazine. It also owns several smaller publications, and provides newswire and specialized information services....

Our Wall Street Stock Forecaster Hotline is a key part of our three-part service (including the monthly advisory and Portfolios supplement). The goal of our Hotline is to keep you up to date on our market outlook and changes in our advice. The Hotline is available for free to all our subscribers, by phone and email. We update it 44 or more times per year....

Our Successful Investor Hotline is a key part of our three-part service (including the monthly advisory and Portfolios supplement). The goal of our Hotline is to keep you up to date with our market outlook and changes in our advice. The Hotline is available to our subscribers by phone and email. We update it 44 or more times per year. To make our Hotline even more useful, we have begun including it in our Index of stocks and subjects that we analyzed in the year to date. The latest edition of the Index goes out with this issue....

After a market rise like the one we’ve had in the past few years, investors often wonder, “When should I sell?” The answer depends as much on the stocks you hold as on the market outlook. Some stocks are made to be traded. That includes many of the more speculative stocks we analyze in Stock Pickers Digest, our affiliated publication which focuses on riskier, more aggressive investments than we do here in Wall Street Stock Forecaster. United Technologies (see below) has more than doubled for us since we first recommended buying it in April 2000 (we called it a “dull industrial with exciting prospects”). That alone may spur some investors to sell. But United has many of the earmarks of a well-established company with great long-term potential — one that is worth hanging on to through a market setback....

Our Wall Street Stock Forecaster approach has three key rules: 1. invest mainly in well-established companies; 2. spread your money out across the five main economic sectors (we provide sector classifications in our monthly Portfolio supplements); 3. focus on stocks that are out of the media/broker limelight. This approach led us in our January 2001 issue to recommend a little-known trucking company, Arkansas Best. In the five years since then, Arkansas Best has roughly tripled for us; meanwhile, the Standard & Poor’s 500 has lost 1.4%. Arkansas Best still has the investment quality and competitive advantages that drew us to it five years ago. It has a spotless balance sheet, a strong reputation with customers and great cost-controlling skills. We still see it as a buy for long-term gains....

We created our Wall Street Stock Forecaster Hotline to keep you up-to-date on our recommendations, and tell you when they change. Now we’ve made our Hotlines available to you on the Internet, so you’ll never need to worry about missing a Hotline. As a subscriber, you can receive our Wall Street Stock Forecaster Hotline every week (44 or more times per year) by phone or email....

Fifth Third Bancorp, $6.88, symbol FITB on Nasdaq (Shares outstanding: 576.9 million; Market cap: $4 billion), is a bank that operates in Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Florida, Tennessee, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Georgia and North Carolina. Its lead bank is Fifth Third Bank in Cincinnati. In all, the company operates a network of 1,311 branches, including 95 Bank Mart locations (these are located in grocery stores and are open seven days a week), and 2,354 automated teller machines. Fifth Third operates through five business segments: commercial banking (which caters to larger businesses), branch banking (for individuals and small businesses), consumer lending (which provides mortgages and home-equity loans), investment advisors (for individuals, companies and not-for-profit organizations) and Fifth Third processing solutions (which handles the electronic transfer of funds, as well as, debit, credit and merchant transaction processing). In the three months ended March 31, 2009, Fifth Third’s revenue fell 12.5%, to $1.5 billion from $1.7 billion a year earlier. The company lost $26 million, or $0.04 a share. Unusual income-tax benefits added $0.18 a share to the company’s first-quarter results. In the year-earlier quarter, Fifth Third earned $286 million, or $0.54 a share....