Thread: NYSE Top Performers Of The Week (MCP, GBE, ZLC, SRI, ALU)

NYSE Top Performers Of The Week (MCP, GBE, ZLC, SRI, ALU)
http://collegestock.com/blog/201-nys...e-zlc-sri-alu/

The Dean wants all students to do their homework on these NYSE Top Performers of the Week:

Recently, Molycorp, Inc. (NYSE:MCP) announced that they have successfully launched the commercial of a new rare earth-based water purification technology called XSORBX™. MCP is only producer of rare earths in the Western Hemisphere. Molycorp, Inc., MCP belonging to the Basic Materials sector and Industrial Metals & Minerals industry currently has a market capital of 2.29B. The stock has performed exceptional well this week with a net gain of 25.27%. The stock is currently trading at 6.43% below its 52 week high and 129.83% above its 52 week low. The average daily volume of the stocks is 1.43M and currently the stock traded with a volume of 3164601. The stock closed at 27.81, a net change of 8.08% from its previous day’s close and -2.01% from Friday’s open.

Grubb & Ellis Company (NYSE:GBE) belonging to the Financial sector and Property Management industry currently has a market capital of 96.60M. Yesterday the company announced that John Dolby, the senior vice president of Grubb & Ellis’ office group, and Cale Miller, senior associate of the office group as the leasing agents of Lake Merritt Tower by CA-Brandywine Realty Trust. Lake Merritt Tower is a 201,000-square-foot office building in Oakland. The stock has performed extremely well this week with a net gain of 24.11%. The stock is currently trading at 40.85% below its 52 week high and 52.75% above its 52 week low. The stock closed at 1.39, a net change of 11.2% from its previous day’s close and 11.2% from todays open. . The average daily volume of the stocks is 260.19K and currently the stock traded with a volume of 846297.

Zale Corporation (NYSE:ZLC) is a specialty retailer of fine jewelry belonging to the Services sector and Jewelry Stores industry closed at 2.19, a net change of 10.05% from its previous day’s close and 6.31% from Friday’s open. The company, at present, has a market capital of 70.32M. The stock has gained 23.03% from its previous week’s close. The stock is currently trading at -73.61% below its 52 week high and 62.22% above its 52 week low. The average daily volume of the stocks is 584.72K and currently the stock traded with a volume of 1343334.

Stoneridge Inc. (NYSE:SRI) belonging to the Consumer Goods sector and Auto Parts industry currently has a market capital of 283.07M. Yesterday, the company announced the pricing of a private placement of $175 million of 9.5 percent senior secured notes due in 2017. The stock prices have surged by 19.78% compared to its previous week. The stock is currently trading at -11.38% below its 52 week high and 97.11% above its 52 week low. On Friday, the stock closed at 10.9, a net change of 7.07% from its previous day’s close and 4.91% from the open. The average daily volume of the stocks is 101.31K and currently the stock traded with a volume of 86608.

Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE:ALU) belonging to the Technology sector and Communication Equipment industry currently has a market capital of 7.59B. The stock has performed exceptional well this week with a net gain of 16.67%. The stock is currently trading at -32.12% below its 52 week high and 49.33% above its 52 week low. The average daily volume of the stocks is 9.59M and currently the stock traded with a volume of 4,362,125. The stock closed at 3.36, a net change of 9.8% from its previous day’s close and 1.82% from Friday’s open.

Jim Kennedy’s $1 billion plan to break a Chinese monopoly
http://stlouis.bizjournals.com/stlouis/stories/2010/09/27/story2.html?b=1285560000^3988221

Four years ago, Jim Kennedy was clearing out the dusty administrative building at his Pea Ridge iron mine in Sullivan, Mo., when he happened upon seven bankers boxes left behind by previous owners. He almost threw them out, but the manila folders inside caught his eye.
Kennedy started reading. It was only then he discovered that the waste rock outside his door and the slate gray earth beneath his boots contained a more intriguing, and scarcer, resource —one he says has the potential to transform the region.
Piled up in Pea Ridge’s old tailings lake and buried underground are unusually high concentrations of so-called rare earth elements (REE). Geological studies indicate Kennedy’s property is home to some $3 billion worth of known “rare earths” reserves. What’s more, Pea Ridge is one of only two permitted REE mines in the country.
But he encountered one major hitch. There is virtually no place on Earth to refine these valuable metals outside of China.
Now Kennedy has the backing of U.S. Sen. Kit Bond and is working to strengthen support from U.S. Rep. Russ Carnahan and other lawmakers for federal legislation that would establish a public-private REE cooperative and appropriate much of the nearly $1 billion it would cost to build a state-of-the art refinery and reduction facility in Missouri. The refinery would create about 300 full-time jobs and attract about 6,000 more as a magnet for technology companies that depend on rare earths supplies, he estimates.
Sporting exotic names like dysprosium and ytterbium near the bottom of the periodic table, rare earths possess unique physical properties that make them essential to high-performance alloys used in all sorts of sophisticated products. Missile guidance systems, next-generation radar, lasers, hybrid car batteries, high-strength magnets used in wind turbines and a growing list of other specialized items rely on REE, as do many more common devices such as smart phones, computer hard drives and fiber optic cables.
“There aren’t too many places that have the amount of reserves that they have,” Cheryl Seeger, chief of the geologic investigations unit for the Missouri Department of Natural Resources’ Division of Geology and Land Surveying, said about Pea Ridge. “It is a tremendous resource and could be really important for Missouri.”
Kennedy, who operates St. Louis-based mining company Wings Enterprises Inc., is proposing a domestic REE refinery that would serve as a counterpoint to China’s monopoly, and he wants to build it in Missouri.
An advisory board consisting of representatives from the U.S. Geological Survey; the Defense Department; the Society for Mining, Metallurgy & Exploration trade organization; rare earths users and others would help identify potential REE reserves worth exploring and mining.
The refinery’s nine-figure price tag, combined with China’s ability to manipulate the REE market to neutralize competitors, presents significant risks to private investors.
That is why Kennedy, 47, insists government support is necessary to build a modern REE mining and refining industry in the United States. With so much at stake, he argues, this is an investment the country can’t afford not to make.
National security and economic concerns about REE supplies have been growing over the past decade. But the issue is now gaining attention in Washington. Hearings are being held, and a couple of rare earths-related bills have been introduced in Congress this year. One was scheduled to be considered by the House Committee on Science and Technology on Sept. 22.
A Carnahan spokeswoman said the congressman, who sits on that House committee, is “working with colleagues to explore the potential that these minerals could represent.”
Bond, one of Kennedy’s strongest supporters, took a firmer stance. “Just like we cannot afford to be dependent on foreign oil cartels for our nation’s energy, counting on any one foreign competitor to supply all of America’s rare earth needs, which are so crucial to not only today’s but also tomorrow’s technological innovations, is too risky a bet,” Bond said. “It is critical we have a domestic source of rare earth minerals, a necessary component for a number of technologies that Americans are increasingly dependent on.”
Missouri, Kennedy argues, is uniquely situated to support a central processing hub for rare earths mined here and throughout the Western Hemisphere. Rare earth deposits have been identified in California, Idaho, Montana, Colorado, Utah and Wyoming, as well as in Canada and Brazil. Mountain Pass in the Mojave Desert is the largest rare-earth mine outside of China. But few deposits, including Mountain Pass, hold large concentrations of heavy REEs, a group of elements in the rare earths family that are considered the most important and valuable.
Pea Ridge, by contrast, features a smaller overall deposit but offers higher concentrations of heavy REEs than perhaps anyplace else in the world, according to third-party surveys performed at the mine.
Missouri’s central location; access to cross-country river, railroad and highway transportation routes; and existing industrial Brownfield sites along the Mississippi River that could serve as the refinery’s home give the state a competitive edge. Pea Ridge also holds permits that other potential mines would probably need years to secure. A U.S. Government Accountability Office report in April found “once a company has secured the necessary capital to start a mine, government and industry officials said it can take from seven to 15 years to bring a property fully online, largely due to the time it takes to comply with multiple state and federal regulations.”
If he can see his vision through, Kennedy and his supporters suggest a REE refinery here would help attract a number of REE-dependent manufacturers and military contractors to the region.
“We could become a new Silicon Valley,” Kennedy said. “We would emphasize the green technology side, but the reality is there are also a lot of defense opportunities. This could present an incredible leverage position for Missouri. If we can get the right language in the legislation, this is ours to lose.”
The China Connection
A quarter century ago, the Chinese government made rare-earth mining and refining a national priority. Today, it controls a near global monopoly on the market. More than 90 percent of the rare earth elements, alloys and components needed by the U.S. military and commercial manufacturers came from China 10 years ago, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. That figure reached 97 percent last year, according to the Government Accountability Office, Congress’s non-partisan research and watchdog arm. That has left American companies and defense contractors almost completely dependent on restricted supplies of Chinese imports.
No commercial rare earths refineries exist in the Western Hemisphere, and the nation’s only two permitted rare earths mines — Missouri’s Pea Ridge and California’s Mountain Pass — have remained inactive for years due to Chinese pricing pressures.


From Investor to Prospector
Jim Kennedy had never even heard of rare earths a few years ago.
Since his discovery of the minerals at his Pea Ridge Mine, though, he’s immersed himself so deeply in the field that he’s invited to speak on the subject at industry conferences, and he does so with the command of a trained geologist.
One of eight kids, Kennedy said he barely made it out of Kirkwood High School as a D- student. He joined the Army and became a member of its Special Forces. That experience, he said, helped him straighten up. When he out got of the service, he enrolled at Meramec Community College and began working with his father, Jerry Kennedy, who had left an engineering career at Monsanto to start his own investment firm, Kennedy Capital.
Kennedy transferred to Washington University and earned a bachelor’s degree from the Olin School of Business in 1989 before earning a master’s in political economics at Wash. U. four years later.
He became a big producer at Kennedy Capital, bringing in about $300 million in new accounts, he said. But over the next 14 years he soured on the business, concluding, “I don’t like capital markets. I think they are destructive.”
In 1999, a year after his father died, Kennedy’s family sold the business to its employees. The bulk of the money went to his mother, and Kennedy walked away from his career in finance.
He and his wife, Nina Abboud, bought a farm, then an excavation company, which led to work with Pea Ridge’s previous owners as an environmental reclamator. When the iron mine wound down as prices fell, Kennedy and Abboud took a chance. They borrowed about $1 million and bought the scarred 2,240-acre property tucked among rolling wooded hills off state Route 185, a winding road paved with Pea Ridge rock.
They have since invested another $15 million in borrowings and operational cash flow into the mine, Kennedy said, and are working to secure financing to upgrade the facility and produce pig iron for steel mills.
While iron mining remains Kennedy’s key economic driver at Pea Ridge, rare earths have become his passion, taking him to Washington, D.C., and beyond to urge the development of a secure domestic supply.


Read more: Jim Kennedy’s $1 billion plan to break a Chinese monopoly - St. Louis Business Journal

Molycorp develops a commercial water treatment product
Molycorp Inc revolutionizes water treatment, with its XSORBX technology, proven to remove 20 percent more of various impurities
http://www.energydigital.com/news/dr...atment-product

Molycorp, Inc, the sole producer of rare earths in the western hemisphere, has commercially launched a new rare earth based water purification technology called XSORBX™, which is a non-toxic, end-use water treatment product. The device uses rare earths produced by Molycorp at its rare earth facility located in California. The company is now selling the product for commercial use in waste water, and other water treatment markets.

“Since integrating XSORBX™ with our patented, rare earth-composition No-Phos™ technology, which to date has yielded superior, cost-advantaged results, we’re seeing a greater than 20 percent increase in the removal of a wide range of impurities, such as nutrients, heavy metals, dyes, and other problematic contaminants,” explained Ken Brummett, President and Chief Executive Officer of Bio-Chem Industries, Inc., a producer of water treatment products based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. “The extraordinarily wide-spectrum effectiveness of this product, which can also remove pathogens, bacteria, viruses, and pharmaceuticals, promises to revolutionize water treatment in markets around the world.” Mr. Brummett also noted, “We have been importing rare earth materials for a number of years. However, the use of Molycorp’s XSORBX™ product allows Bio-Chem to eliminate its previous dependence on foreign sources.”

Mark Smith, Chief Executive Officer of Molycorp, added: “The commercialization of XSORBX™ is an important milestone for Molycorp. It has enormous potential to help meet the unique drinking water challenges faced by the U.S. Armed Forces as well as nations that face challenges with delivering potable water on a daily basis. These are exciting areas of growth for our product."

China blocks rare earth mineral exports to Japan (Yesterday)
http://newsindi.com/china-blocks-rar...pan-yesterday/

HONG KONG — Sharply raising the stakes in a dispute over Japan’s detention of a Chinese fishing trawler captain, the Chinese government has placed a trade embargo on all exports to Japan of a crucial category of minerals used in products like hybrid cars, wind turbines and guided missiles.
Chinese customs officials are halting all shipments to Japan of so-called rare earth elements, industry experts said Thursday.
On Tuesday, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao personally called for Japan’s release of the captain, who was detained after his vessel collided with two Japanese coast guard vessels about 40 minutes apart as he tried to fish in waters controlled by Japan but long claimed by China. Mr. Wen threatened unspecified further actions if Japan did not comply.
A Chinese commerce ministry official declined Thursday to discuss its trade policy on rare earths, saying only that Mr. Wen’s comments were the Chinese government position.
China mines 93 percent of the world’s rare earth minerals as well as more than 99 percent of the global supply of some of the most prized rare earths, which sell for several hundred dollars a pound.
Japan has been the main buyer of Chinese rare earths for many years, using them for a wide range of industrial purposes, like making glass for solar panels.
They are also used in small steering-control motors in conventional gasoline-powered cars as well as in motors that help propel hybrid cars like the Toyota Prius.
U.S. companies now rely mostly on Japan for magnets and other components using rare earth elements, as the U.S. manufacturing capacity in the industry became uncompetitive and mostly closed over the past two decades.
The House Armed Services Committee has slated a hearing Oct. 5 to review legislation to subsidize a revival of the U.S. rare earths industry.
The main American rare earths mine, in Mountain Pass, Calif., closed in 2002, but efforts are under way to reopen it.