Weather may influence stock prices

A recent study has concluded that the weather may affect how investors decide on stock purchasing. Sunny skies seem to put professional investors in a mood to buy, while cloudy conditions tend to discourage stock purchases.

J.C. Penney Leadership in question

What does it say about a company when even it doesn't have any confidence in it's CEO? This is the case for J.C. Penney and it's cheif executive, Ron Johnson, who had a 97 percent pay cut (as reported by a regulatory filing on Tuesday). Ron Johnson is fairly new to J.C. Penney, having only been hired on last year, but his history so far has been a series of missteps for the company that can take part of the blame for the lost $4 billion in sales for fiscal 2012.

Mobile shopping at your local Walmart (WMT)

The biggest competition for Wal-Mart (WMT) may not be other grocery chains like Fred Meyers or Costco, but online retailer Amazon (AMZN). Neil Ashe, chief executive of Wal-Mart's e-commerce unit, spoke on Tuesday about increasing their global online sales and making ordering through their website easier for their customers who are more and more on their smart phones while they shop. While he said Wal-Mart was on track to do over $9 billion in online sales this year, they're testing a new locker system that will hold goods ordered online that can be picked up by shoppers later. This is similar to Amazon's locker plan that is being set up in Staples Inc. stores. 

Technical Issues with Facebook IPO to be Corrected.

This story is featured on Megasafe Money today but it also had to be brought up here as well.  The initial IPO offering for Facebook was highly anticipated and from the start there seemed to be problems. 

Regulators today approved of a plan to compensate market makers who lost money in the botched Facebook Inc. (FB) IPO in May on the Nasdaq exchange.

Nasdaq, a unit of Nasdaq OMX Group Inc. (NDAQ), has offered a revised $62 million settlement to those brokerages that lost money.

The decision from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission was in response to a series of high-profile glitches last year that shook the market, including the handling of Facebook's long-anticipated initial public offering. 

This is welcome news to initial investors, however it has caused share price to dip by 2%. It will be interesting to follow the ramifications of this decision by the SEC today.

How companies and stock prices respond to bad news.

Bad news can and usually does cause investors to overreact and sell stocks that may still be fundamentally solid, which is fine for the newer investors who now have an opportunity to grab a potentially undervalued stock. However, this bounce back may not happen at all if the business subject to the bad news handles it poorly. 

The two most recent examples of stock price falling because of bad news made worse are Lululemon (LULU) and Electronic Arts (EA). Lululemon began a recall of their too-shear Luon yoga pants, but with corporate changing it’s earning predictions for the year ahead and angry customers reporting poor service on the retail side there is much confidence in Lululemon lost. 

Meanwhile, EA has had many troubles with it’s recent release of their game SimCity, with players unable to connect to their mandatory service and then trying to justify the server problems due to technical issues customers later discovered didn’t exist. Add to that EA’s CEO resigning and you see investors running from the stock in droves.