I recently came across this list on Forbes on the largest 25 tax payers. Forbes does a bit of analysis on each of them. It is probably worth your time to jump over, but I thought I would give the highlights here:

 

Rank of tax expense

Company

Symbol

Effective Tax Rate

1 ExxonMobil XOM 39%
2 Chevron Corporation CVX 43%
3 Apple Inc. AAPL 25%
4 Wells Fargo & Co. WFC 31.2%
5 JP Morgan Chase & Co. JPM 26%
6 Wal-Mart Stores WMT 31%
7 ConocoPhillips COP 51.5%
8 Berkshire Hathaway Inc. BRK 28%
9 IBM IBM 24%
10 Microsoft Corporation MSFT 22.8%
11 Philip Morris International Inc. PM 29.5%
12 Goldman Sachs GS 33%
14 Comcast Corporation CMCS 32%
14 The Procter & Gamble Co. PG 23.5%
15 Johnson & Johnson JNJ 23.7%
16 Intel Corporation INTC 23.6%
17 Occidental Petroleum Corp. OXY 42%
18 UnitedHealth Group UHG 35.9%
19 The Walt Disney Company DIS 32.7%
20 AT&T T 27.8%
21 Oracle ORCL 21.4%
22 The Coca-Cola Company KO 23.1%
23 The Home Depot Inc. HD 37.2%
24 McDonald’s MCD 32.4%
25 Google GOOG 19.4%

Company name AT&T Inc.
Stock ticker T
Live stock price [stckqut]T[/stckqut]
P/E compared to competitors Good
MANAGEMENT EXECUTION
Employee productivity Fair
Sales growth Fair
EPS growth Poor
P/E growth Poor
EBIT growth Poor
ANALYSIS
Confident Investor Rating Poor
Target stock price (TWCA growth scenario) $1.75
Target stock price (averages with growth) $2.1
Target stock price (averages with no growth) $2.42
Target stock price (manual assumptions) $23.42

The following company description is from Google Finance: http://www.google.com/finance?q=t

AT&T Inc. is a holding company. The Company is a provider of telecommunications services in the United States and worldwide. These include wireless communications, local exchange services, long-distance services, data/broadband and Internet services, video services, managed networking, wholesale services and directory advertising and publishing. It operates in four segments: wireless, which provides both wireless voice and data communications services across the United States and, through roaming agreements, in foreign countries; wireline, which provides landline voice and data communication services, AT&T U-Verse TV, broadband and voice services (U-Verse) and managed networking to business customers; advertising solutions, which publishes Yellow and White Pages directories and sells directory advertising and Internet-based advertising and local search, and other, which provides results from customer information services and all corporate and other operations.

Confident Investor comments: This is the first of a 4 part analysis of Jim Cramer’s “Rough Diamonds of the Dow” and frankly it is not starting well.  I really do not like AT&T. At this price and at this time, I do not think that a Confident Investor can confidently invest in this stock.

Jim Cramer of Mad Money and The Street is arguably the most famous stock analyst in today’s media.  The best thing about Jim is that he tries to explain everything in great detail and he also admits when he makes a mistake.  It would be great if more analysts (probably myself included) admitted when they were wrong!

Cramer recently picked his “Diamonds of the Dow” or maybe “Rough Diamonds of the Dow”.  So for the next 4 days we will take each one of these and see how they do in the CIR (Confident Investor Rating) scale.  Should be fun!

The four companies are:

AT&T [stckqut]T[/stckqut]

Boeing [stckqut]BA[/stckqut]

General Electric [stckqut]GE[/stckqut]

Kraft Foods [stckqut]KFT[/stckqut]

If you sit on Twitter long enough (especially Stocktwits) you will see a message like this: “I think XXXX company is great because their new widget is awesome and it is going to shake up the industry.” So the question is out there, should you invest in the company based on this amazing new product?

Probably not!

  1. One cool product does not make a great company. It takes many products over a series of years to make a company that you can be confident will be a long-term hold. Great companies consistently offer good products to their customers and create ways to keep and attract customers over a long cycle.
  2. While there is some bounce on new good news, typically this is just a bounce. It doesn’t last. If you are a day-trader then you may want to take advantage of these “news bounces” but if you want to hold a security for some time, you need more than just a single new cool product.
  3. You are probably late.  Most companies have the majority of their stock held by institutional investors. If this new product was that significant then they have already factored this news into their holdings. Major investment firms do not wake up in the morning, read Engadget, and then decide to buy a company. If this new product was that significant then they were slowly accumulating the stock in advance of the introduction and they were doing it by listening to the company’s statements of direction in their annual meetings, quarterly calls, and analyst updates.
  4. You are swimming against the tide. As I pointed out in 3, most of the stock of many companies is with institutional investors. They aren’t going to buy the inflated price from a product bubble, they will wait until the excitement is over to continue to accumulate. That means the only people you are going to sell your stock to are the fools that also listened to the new product fervor and are late to the game (so they have made a 2nd mistake by being late).
  5. You may be wrong! How many great products have been introduced that simply didn’t live up to the hype? Even great companies will sometimes release a dud product.

Let me give you a great example.  Arguably, the iPhone from Apple is the most significant cell phone ever released to the market. It only operates on the AT&T [stckqut]ATT[/stckqut] network so a few weeks before the introduction of the iPhone in June of 2007, you could have surmised that AT&T stock was going to boom.  Didn’t happen, on May 31, 2007 the stock closed at $24.82. Yesterday, the stock closed at $26.26 – not even 10% growth. Yes, I know that AT&T put out some dividends in that time but those didn’t increase in size either – on April 27, 2007 AT&T gave out a dividend of $.412 and on April 28, 2010 they did a dividend of $.398 (all prices per Yahoo Finance).

On the flip side, Apple [stckqut]AAPL[/stckqut] had a significant rise in stock price but Apple makes a lot of great products and their customers love the company. Apple is a Good Company on my ranking scale, AT&T is not.

Market timing is fine for buying stocks but you should limit yourself to momentum indicators and overbought indicators on Good Companies (see the Watch List on the right side of this site). Don’t try to market time based on product introduction hype.

According to Blogging Stocks, Tim Moran is predicting that Apple (AAPL) will soon be offering its ground-breaking iPhone on all carriers. His prediction is for 2010.

I can’t find another source of this prediction but if it does happen, it will be a major blow to every other handset vendor. The iPhone still has a significant advantage over the other phones. The biggest drawback for the phone is the network that ATT uses has created a great deal of consternation.

Yes, it could get way, way better. Tim Moran with Oppenheimer & Co. believes that the iPhone will reach all major U.S. wireless carriers in 2010. It’s as if Apple hasn’t sold enough iPhones already. That number could be punched up in a huge way if Moran is correct.

It makes sense — Apple has accomplished handset sales in the U.S. with one product (several updated versions, of course) and one carrier, completely changing the landscape of what most consumers think a cutting-edge wireless phone is. If Apple were to unleash an iPhone for all the other carriers besides AT&T (T), it could add to its $40 billion cash hoard significantly.

UPDATE: BusinessWeek is also reporting this story.