Insurance accidents, stolen bases, and a flurry of notable quarterly reports filled the shoes of the week we left behind.
MarshMac heart attack
When New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer has you in the crosshairs, keep the white surrender flags at the ready. Fresh from spanking the mutual fund industry until it cleaned up its ways and called Spitzer daddy, Marsh & McLennan
Marsh & McLennan also has its consulting business and its Putnam family of mutual funds, yet those areas were also rocked by scandal. The insurance industry looks like it's about to get a massive makeover courtesy of Spitzer's watchdog ways. For consumers, that is probably a good thing. For investors, it may require wearing hardhats.
Kicking the curse, Boston-style
Watching the most improbable comeback in sports history, with the Boston Red Sox taking four straight games from the New York Yankees in advancing to the World Series, was impressive. Yet maybe Kevin Brown's spotty outing in the final game of the series was due to the XM Satellite Radio
Yet those who wondered what this would mean to rival Sirius Satellite Radio
eBay investors say "Buy it now"
Swinging for the fences and rarely missing, eBay
Busy on Thursday?
It was definitely a hectic week, with earnings reports coming in at breakneck speed, and that was clearly evident on Thursday. In a span of minutes, Microsoft
Digging deep into each report would probably have you fumbling for a bottle of Visine by Monday morning, so let's see if we can cover these major events in just one sentence apiece.
- Amazon shocked the market when taking the high end of the leading online retailer's guidance for 2004 and connecting it with the low end of its surprisingly drab outlook for next year suggested that net sales next year may grow by just 7% (granted, it was 22% the other way around).
- Google kicked off its first quarter as a public company in grand fashion, with revenue and earnings more than doubling.
- Unlike its fizzy pop, Coke's third-quarter revenues and earnings (before a series of one-time charges) came in flat.
- While Microsoft's stock has been in a deep slumber, the world's largest software company continues to grow as quarterly profits and sales inched 11% and 12% higher, respectively.
See you next week!
Longtime Fool contributor Rick Munarriz isn't much of a Red Sox or Yankees fan but was still mesmerized by the amazing series. He does not own shares in any of the companies mentioned in this story.