It is certainly not a recession like we have seen for quite some time. Jobless figures in the United States are approaching 26-year highs, indicating that a bottom of sorts has fallen out of the economy.
The Commerce Department announced in the first week of February that employers slashed payrolls by 598,000 in January, the most since the end of 1974, catapulting the unemployment rate to 7.6 per cent.
We see the signs in the headlines that have greeted us every day since last September: auto makers and banks in search of government assistance; corporations bleeding red ink and laying off, including the once-mighty Microsoft and even The Walt Disney Company issuing pink slips in the thousands.
In Canada, in the first week of February, came word that January jobless figures were much worse than anticipated. Statistics Canada, the nation’s number cruncher, estimated that 129,000 people were sent packing from the workforce, many of them in the manufacturing in the once-supreme province of Ontario, ballooning the national jobless rate to 7.2 per cent.
Markets hate uncertainty, witnessed by the dips and rises taken by equity markets. How to deal with this suspense will be crucial. Either someone has to take a chance on the markets (as Warren Buffett has done recently, plunging billions into the insurer Swiss Re), or many of us just have to take a step back, breathe a bit, ''chill'' as the young people say, and take a chance of their own.
One sector that is in the business of fun, and which has also takin a beating is the gaming and hospitality sector, which includes bargains such as Las Vegas Sands Corporation (NASDAQ: LVS).
Las Vegas Sands Corp. is developing a slew of casino properties in Macao, Singapore and Sands Bethworks, Pennsylvania’s first gaming resort destination. The company is also working on the development of a leisure resort complex on Hengqin Island in China.
LVS last reported financial numbers in the third quarter (ending in September), when net revenue increased 67.2 per cent to $1.11 billion U.S, compared to $661.0 million in the third quarter of 2007.
Alas, the company has not been spared going the layoff route, issuing more than 200 pink slips at the end of 2008. LVS’ stock price found itself within the small cap ceiling around $4 a share, just off its 52-week lows below $3. Its peak had dwarfed $95 during the past year. Volume is consistently in the tens of thousands, with the occasional multi-million-share session seen in early February.
If this sounds like something that agrees with your temperament, dust off the ''sand'' off your portfolio and take a look!
By: AllPennyStocks.com
Related Stories
