Wal-Mart (WMT) closed at $53.43. WMT's volatility is flat on tight trading range as it is expected to report Q4 EPS on February 18. February put option implied volatility is at 20, March and June puts are at 21; near its 26-week average of 21, according to Track Data, suggesting non-directional price movement.

Three stocks with IV rise on January 29; Berkshire Hathaway (BRK/B) +9%, Focus Media (FMCN) + 8%, Talbots (TLB) +6% according to IVolatility.

Option Update is provided by Stock Specialist Paul Foster of theflyonthewall.com

Berkshire Hathaway Class B (BRK.B - option chain) shares are are on the move today after Standard & Poor's announced that the stock will be added to its benchmark S&P 500 index, replacing Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNI), which will be acquired by Berkshire. BRK.B will also be added to the S&P 100. If you think that the stock won't fall by too much in the coming months, then now could be a good time to look at a bullish hedged trade on BRK.B, which is now possible with the recent 50:1 stock split.

BRK.B opened this morning at $73.28. So far today the stock has hit a low of $70.82 and a high of $73.28. As of 12:00, BRK.B is trading at $71.08 up $3.09 (4.5%). The chart for BRK.B looks bullish.

The financial world was rocked, more or less, when Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B) recently announced a plan to split its B shares -- billionaire investor Warren Buffett, the company's chairman and CEO, famously refused to split the stock for years. (In fact, the A shares are still trading in six-digit territory, upwards of $100,000 apiece.)

On Monday, option players didn't hesitate to express their reservations about the stock split. During the course of the session, speculators on the International Securities Exchange (ISE) bought to open 4,736 puts on BRK.B, compared to just 2,559 calls. The single-day put/call volume ratio arrived at 1.85, with bearish bets nearly doubling their bullish counterparts.

A new year is upon us and like the beginnings of any year, and even more so, a decade, the predictions are flying fast and furious.

The start of 2010 is bringing out every analyst, talking head, business journalist, periodical and newsletter propagator, sportscaster, palm reader, taro card interpreter, astrologist, medium and madam making predictions to garner attention, entertain and even profit. Apologies to anyone I left out.

During my tenure at BloggingStocks I have expressed my opinion often about the contribution that dividends make to your overall return. Most shrewd investors, and especially "my pal Warren," know this and understand why I re-emphasize the point when I make my annual selections.

By now I hope you have had a chance to peruse my picks for 2010. If not the links below will give you another opportunity.

The first four picks were all from the contenders list, but here I reach back to earlier in the year, when in May, I wrote about why I thought Williams Companies Inc. (WMB) would outperform four other, more popular stocks.

I compared it to Apple Inc. (AAPL), Google Inc. (GOOG), Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) and Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRK.B).

During the past seven months this turned out to be true for half the period, but Apple came on strong and passed it by the second review.

This year's selections do not seem to offer the same dividend opportunities of years past and my first three choices have none at all. That changes with this pick. Home Depot (HD) is distributing a 3.09% yield.

It's getting tiring to relate the demise of various companies to the residential market collapse, high unemployment and so forth, but certainly this company has been greatly affected. In addition, Home Depot was already struggling to recover from a "me first" CEO who happened to be forced out with the small stipend of $200 million, leaving behind shabby stores with questionable customer service while at the same time facing strong competition from Lowe's Cos (LOW).

Where as my fist pick, Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B) is a large cap diversified conglomerate, my second, Grubb & Ellis Co. (GBE), is a micro-cap stock of $90 million.

GBE is a network of nearly 130 owned and affiliated offices, providing commercial real estate services to property owners, institutional investors, and tenants. Its 1,800 brokers and some 6,000 affiliated real estate professionals offer advisory and brokerage, property management, construction consultation, and other services.

The company has been devastated by the bursting of the residential real estate market bubble, lost equity value, illiquid capital markets and the still impending concern over the commercial real estate market facing rising vacancies as hundreds of billions of dollars in loans must be rolled over.

If there ever was a stock that was hiding in plain sight, it is that of Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B) which is capitalized at a tad over $150 billion and run by "my pal Warren" and his pal Charlie. That's Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, perhaps the most successful investors in five generations.

Berkshire Hathaway, a textile mill, was Buffett's first turn-around play. He was successful and started generating significant amounts of free cash-flow that allowed him to invest in other things. Those investments also paid off and eventually the original enterprise became the namesake of today's diversified giant holding company.

I selected BRK.B for numerous reasons and believe it will easily beat the market next year as has been it's history.

To arrive at this years ten picks I scoured business journals and editorials, online and off. I also ran through a series of stock screens repeatedly over the last few months filtering for five primary value metrics identifying stocks worthy of further consideration.

The 5 data points were price-to-sales (P/S), price-to-book (P/B), price-to-cash flow (P/CF), dividend yield and return-on-equity (ROE). I did look at other things but these were the subject of my initial focus.

Today was a low volume trading day without much economic fanfare as many market participants were out or were talking about the Christmas holiday rather than the markets. The manufacturing output was reported for the Dallas and Chicago Fed Districts, but this in and of itself is rarely enough to heavily influence the markets. There will be more traders around on Tuesday and Wednesday most likely, but then it is likely to peter out again on Thursday ahead of the New Year's Day holiday this Friday. The markets were mixed throughout the trading day, and the real position for an up-close or down-close was something not known until the very end of the trading day.

Here are today's unofficial closing bell levels:

Dow 10,547.30 +27.20 (0.26%)
S&P 500 1,127.78 +1.30 (0.12%)
Nasdaq 2,291.08 +5.39 (0.24%)

Top Day Trader Alerts
Top Stock Rumors

American International Group (AIG) is holding onto its property/casualty division for a while. It originally planned to unload 20% of Chartis (formerly named AIU) via an initial public offering or through a private transaction involving institutional investors.

But CEO Robert Benmosche is concerned that he'd be giving up the operating unit at discount prices. Selling cheap to repay the government won't benefit anybody – not even taxpayers – so he's waiting until an appropriate price can be fetched.

Yes I am picking Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B) over Apple Inc. (AAPL) in 2010.

Last week I suggested in two separate posts that Apple investors potential gains going forward in 2010 would be far less rewarding than in 2009. The issue first came up in Chasing Value: Ten stocks for 2010 -- Part 9 + Apple where I was simply reviewing Apple for inclusion in the ten but some of the faithful (sometimes over zealous) took exception to this.

The stock having reached an all time high last month was part of what lead me to write, "Sure it is possible that Apple comes out with another winning product but that rampant speculation is among the things that have driven the stock price to where it is. I think the downside outweighs the upside by a large margin so I will pass on this one."

Some of the comments I received only made my case stronger.

Analyst Upgrades

• Kaufman Bros. upgraded Yahoo! (YHOO) to buy from hold after channel checks indicated display advertising is seeing continued improvement in pricing and demand. The firm finds the risk/reward profile on Yahoo! shares attractive at current levels and raised its price target on the stock to $20 from $19.
• Citigroup upgraded Edwards Lifesciences (EW) to buy from hold following the company's investor meeting as it believes new product launches will serve as catalysts in 2010. Citi raised its target on shares to $101 from $72.
• Deutsche Bank upgraded BWAY Holding (BWY) to buy from hold following the company's Q4 results and raised its target on shares to $22 from $17.
• Clearwire (CLWR) was upgraded to buy from sell at Soleil.
• Nokia (NOK) was raised to hold from sell at Societe Generale.
• NCR Corp. (NCR) was upgraded at JPMorgan to overweight from neutral.

Is it time to take a bite out of Apple, Inc (AAPL) or leave it on the vine? After reviewing the current list by examining the stock yields and price-to-cash flow (P/CF) we will take a look at Apple for 2010.

Yesterday I dropped two stocks, but the list is still too long. In the coming weeks there will be more cuts and if I find anything of more value perhaps there will be something new.