Credit Loan Deals

As we head into the last half of april, company earnings will start to roll out.  This is commonly known as 1st Quarter earnings season.  The beginnings of what has been rolling out is been a mixed bag of earnings.  Google pushed the markets quite a bit higher as many people thought they would have weak earnings from the recession, but the suprised the market.  Yahoo slightly beat estimates, but didn’t move the stock much, and many other companies are very mixed in their earnings picture.

The leader in Internet Search earned $1.31 billion in the 1st quarter of 2008. Earnings were $4.12 per share up from $3.18 per share in the 1st quarter of 2007. 1st quarter revenue was $5.19 billion up from $3.66 billion a year earlier.

Google is the dominate internet search engine. More than 50% of all online searches are done through Google. It’s a great investment due to it’s complete dominance of the AdWords paid/sponsored links. So far Google is showing a resistance to the US recession, but we will see if it can hold up in the latter stages of the recession if online advertising dollars dwendle.

General Electric Co. (aka GE) stock is currently down more than 11% as they missed their anticipated 51 cents per share earnings forcast by analysts and missed GE’s own forcast of between 50 - 53 cents per share.  GE posted 43 cents per share in earnings in the 1st Quarter, down 8 cents for their estimates and down a penny from year ago earnings.  GE stated that disappointments were spread across all of their businesses both in financial and industrial segments.  GE has lowered 2008 full year earnings expectations from $2.42 per share down to between $2.20 and $2.30 per share.