Getting snarky at Rick! van Alphabet would be just too damned easy today after the way he awarded himself one point one eight five million stock options at $5.25 on Friday. You do realize this comes out of the quarterly expenses, yeah? If you’re a shareholder in this never-to-mine-an-ounce-ever company you’re paying for his legal theft through your back pocket. Anyway, like I said, I’m not going to mention a word about him, his company his trickeries and lies nor point out the pummelling the stock is taking at market today after being pumped to high heaven in New York last week. Not a word.
Let’s go with some LatAm names outside of mining that we haven’t visited for a while and put a few charts up, too. Now for sure all these things are getting checked back today, but we’re taking a slightly wider view just for once. No minutae of intraday.
Telecom Argentina (TEO) down 2.3% at $9.86 TEO has always been my idea of about the best run company on the Merval index. It keeps churning out growth and profit, too. It hasn’t done much more than track the general index since the big rebound, but when you’re up against foreign behemoths such as Tenaris and Petrobras it has nothing to be ashamed of, really.
Cosan (CZZ) down 14.1% at $5.22. Hey, remember the fool who didn’t buy CZZ at $3.85 cos he wanted $3.60 or something? Yeah, that fool tis I. Errar humanum est, but CZZ has made great strides recently. With crude back in the high 60s the buzz is back in the LatAm ethanol business, by the way. We talked a bit about this in the last IKN Weekly.
Ecopetrol (EC) down 4.1% at $22.78. EC is another recent winner in the world of (relatively speaking) bigcap LatAm plays. The company is run well, and that’s always good. The Colombian oil patch (not just EC) is quickly turning into a hot story down here, in fact. DYODD.
Petrobras (PBR) down 7.5% at $41.52. Petrobras is everyone’s idea of the biggest oil company down here. Well it gets dwarfed by PDVSA, but let’s not worry about that one, as PBR is still a big player getting bigger. The rumblings, rumours and positive anticipation is back about the subsalt oil reserves that caused all that hype last year, too.
Finally, a bit of mining. Southern Copper (PCU) down 7.2% at $21.70 and Freeport (FCX) down 7% at $52.90. Both stocks down (along with copper….ahem) but both have had great recent runs. Here’s a chart with FCX, PCU and the S&P500 index together but on a shorter timescale than the above charts. This one is just the last two months.
