Ways To Money

Occidental Petroleum Corporation’s (NYSE:OXY) second quarter 2011 operating earnings jumped 68.9% to $2.23 per share from $1.32 in the year-ago quarter. Earnings also clearly surpassed the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $2.19 per share.

GAAP net earnings during the quarter were $2.23 per share versus $1.31 per share reported in the year-ago quarter.

Total Revenue

Occidentals quarterly revenue increased 34.1% to $6.17 billion from $4.6 billion in the year-ago quarter. The actual results of the company were also higher than the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $5.64 billion.

Total revenue increased on the back of higher contributions from all three of the company’s segments, namely Oil and Gas, Chemical and Midstream, Marketing and Other. The results were nominally hurt by higher eliminations compared with the year-ago quarter.

Production, Sales and Realized Price

Occidentals average daily production volumes notched 715 thousand barrels of oil equivalents (MBOE) in the second quarter, up 2% year over year. The increase in volume was mainly due to strong production from domestic operations, which were partly offset by lower volumes from Middle East/North Africa. Occ

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The ideal financier would have a working crystal ball. As it is, even the best stock pickers in the market are always guessing to a certain level. Keep that under consideration as you try to pick your stocks, and remember that it’s important to always start little and test the stock’s performance before you sink additional cash into it. This exercise may take only a day or two in the penny market due to the incredible speed with which these little stocks are exchanged.

Use approximately ten percent of your investment budget to begin with, and restrict yourself to six stocks or less. Rushing will most likely lose your cash. Completely research your target corporations. Have they been about for 1 or 2 years? Stable firms are definitely a better bet ; particularly with the inflating number of company screw ups nowadays, you do not want to get a stock for inexpensive to find out that its price was thanks to the company’s forthcoming collapse.

Picking a penny stock truly means picking a good company. Read all their up to date PR releases and any info about them in the news. Have they been concerned in any scandals? Is their service in heavy demand, and is this demand sure to increase in the future markets? Getti

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In late April, PowerShares and Deutsche Bank launched a number of exchange traded notes based on European and Japanese sovereign bonds.

For those looking to leverage their long exposure to such markets, PowerShares DB 3x Italian Treasury Bond Futures ETN , PowerShares DB 3x German Bond Futures ETN and PowerShares DB 3x Japanese Govt Bond Futures ETN were also made available.

Based on the current debt situation in Europe as well as the market volatility this year in Japan following the nuclear disaster a few months back, the release of these products may prove timely for those institutional investors looking for exposure to these markets whom may not have the desire nor acumen to purchase the actual bonds themselves and instead are looking for something in ETN wrapper.

Being newer products to the map, these ETNs do not typically trade a ton of volume on a day to day basis, and the visual liquidity shown on the “screen markets” may be deceptive and should not deter the investor from looking to establish sizable positions.

Chart source: StockCharts.com.

The lull in the economy has made it incredibly difficult for everyone to stay afloat. Jobs have been lost and many are struggling to create a budget with unchanged salaries while the cost of living continues to rise. However, in light of the staggering job market, many have been able to obtain careers, and are ready to become financially stable yet again.

When faced with tight finances, many individuals turn to credit cards to help get them through the hard times. While this can be okay if you are 100 percent sure that you will have funds in the future, it isn’t okay if you aren’t sure about your future finances. Credit cards aren’t free money. You have to pay them back on a monthly basis. Unfortunately, many who are in financial binds don’t think this far ahead, and when they receive their monthly credit card bill either don’t pay it or pay that bill with another credit card only furthering the cycle.

Not paying your credit card bills or paying previous credit card bills with new credit cards will only result in you destroying your credit. The lower your score drops, the harder it will be to recover once you are financially stable which can often be a hindrance when trying to purchase a home or buy a new car. When you have low credit, you can expect to only be able to obtain loans with high interest rates, if you are able to a loan at all. Paying hi

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Mobile Phone Revolutionaries?From the article Africas Mobile Economic Revolution:It may seem unlikely, given its track record in technological development, but Africa is at the center of a mobile revolution. In the west, we have been adapting mobile phones to be more like our computers: the smartphone could be described as a PC for your pocket. In Africa, where a billion people use only 4% of the worlds electricity, many cannot afford to charge a computer, let alone buy one. This has led phone users and developers to be more resourceful, and African mobiles are being used to do things that the developed world is only now beginning to pick up on.The most dramatic example of this is mobile banking. Four years ago in Kenya, the mobile network Safaricom introduced a service called M-Pesa which allows users to store money on their mobiles. If you want to pay a utilities bill or send money to a friend, you simply dispatch the amount by text and the recipient converts it into cash at their local M-Pesa office. It is cheap, easy to use and, for millions of Africans unable to access a bank account or afford the hefty charges of using one, nothing short of revolutionary.Safaricom didnt invent mobile banking: it existed previously in countries such as Norway and Japan, but on a small scale and with nothing like the seismic effect it had in Kenya. Full Post…