 quickly and efficiently. But sometimes, you’ll find your strengths aren’t enough, and to prepare for that inevitability, you should always be learning new skills that you can employ when a problem comes up.Prelude Capital Management LLC lifted its position in Mondelez International, Inc. (NASDAQ:MDLZ – Get Rating) by 191.9% in the second quarter, according to its most recent Form 13F filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The firm owned 11,622 shares of the company’s stock after purchasing an additional 7,641 shares during the quarter. Prelude Capital Management LLC’s holdings in Mondelez International were worth $722,000 at the end of the most recent reporting period.
A number of other hedge funds have also recently modified their holdings of the company. Stock Yards Bank & Trust Co. grew its holdings in shares of Mondelez International by 341.6% in the second quarter. Stock Yards Bank & Trust Co. now owns 123,400 shares of the company’s stock valued at $7,662,000 after purchasing an additional 95,456 shares during the period. Summit Global Investments grew its holdings in shares of Mondelez International by 1.7% in the second quarter. Summit Global Investments now owns 178,453 shares of the company’s stock valued at $11,080,000 after purchasing an additional 2,924 shares during the period. Captrust Financial Advisors grew its holdings in shares of Mondelez International by 5.7% in the second quarter. Captrust Financial Advisors now owns 148,694 shares of the company’s stock valued at $9,284,000 after purchasing an additional 7,982 shares during the period. Strategic Wealth Partners Ltd. grew its holdings in shares of Mondelez International by 1,033.0% in the second quarter. Strategic Wealth Partners Ltd. now owns 40,177 shares of the company’s stock valued at $2,495,000 after purchasing an additional 36,631 shares during the period. Finally, Beach Investment Counsel Inc. PA grew its holdings in shares of Mondelez International by 0.9% in the second quarter. Beach Investment Counsel Inc. PA now owns 192,449 shares of the company’s stock valued at $11,949,000 after purchasing an additional 1,651 shares during the period. Hedge funds and other institutional investors own 76.41% of the company’s stock.
Several brokerages have weighed in on MDLZ. Cowen began coverage on shares of Mondelez International in a research note on Wednesday, September 14th. They set an “outperform” rating and a $71.00 target price for the company. TheStreet raised shares of Mondelez International from a “c+” rating to a “b+” rating in a research note on Monday, December 12th. Morgan Stanley increased their target price on shares of Mondelez International from $63.00 to $69.00 and gave the stock an “overweight” rating in a research note on Wednesday, November 2nd. Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschaft increased their target price on shares of Mondelez International from $72.00 to $75.00 and gave the stock a “buy” rating in a research note on Tuesday, December 6th. Finally, Exane BNP Paribas began coverage on shares of Mondelez International in a research note on Tuesday, November 15th. They set a “neutral” rating and a $68.00 target price for the company. Four equities research analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and thirteen have given a buy rating to the stock. According to MarketBeat, Mondelez International currently has an average rating of “Moderate Buy” and an average price target of $71.56.
In related news, EVP Maurizio Brusadelli sold 22,388 shares of the firm’s stock in a transaction that occurred on Monday, December 5th. The shares were sold at an average price of $67.55, for a total value of $1,512,309.40. Following the sale, the executive vice president now owns 179,588 shares of the company’s stock, valued at $12,131,169.40. The sale was disclosed in a filing with the SEC, which can be accessed through this hyperlink. 0.32% of the stock is owned by corporate insiders.
The company also recently announced a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Friday, January 13th. Investors of record on Friday, December 30th will be issued a $0.385 dividend. The ex-dividend date of this dividend is Thursday, December 29th. This represents a $1.54 annualized dividend and a yield of 2.33%. Mondelez International’s dividend payout ratio (DPR) is 68.44%.I don’t know about you, but I’m always looking for fun things to do with kids during summer vacation. I’ve vowed to make 2013 rock, and so every day this summer (and some days more than once), I’m going to be doing something special, something awesome, and fun for (and with) my kids. I hope you’ll join me!
The park is just one of those things that screams FUN, no matter how young or old you are. We find children of all ages there all the time, it does not discriminate, which is why we try to go there often. Even if it isn’t the biggest park imaginable, you can make it something extraordinary by playing games!
My daughter, above, shows how she balance with her hands crossed. One of the games we played was who could balance the longest.
We also do relay races, and “obstacle course,” where the kids traverse from one part of the park to the other, climbing the nets, doing the monkey bars, slides, etc., all to get to the end the “fastest” and beat their previous times.
Like I said, the park is itself fun, but what you DO at the park can truly make it magical. We love to picnic at the park, too.
What about you? Is there a favorite park that you go to with your kids? What do you do there?
The promise of platform as a service is strong but so is the competition. Here's a look at what the major players are offering in this increasingly key app dev area.
Cloud-based PaaS offerings have not had the kind of explosive growth that SaaS and IaaS solutions have seen over the past decade. However, it still is the preferred option for startups with few developers, where the pace of development precedes control over underlying IT infrastructure. PaaS simplifies development by abstracting the lower-level infrastructure and providing an easy-to-use platform to develop, test and deploy apps.
With preconfigured, console-driven access to infrastructure, ops teams can drastically cut down the time spent wiring together components at the server, storage and networking level of the stack. Platform-as-a-service offerings typically contain all that is needed for development, such as compute resources, OSes, tools for development and testing, built-in security and end-to-end monitoring. PaaS is great for organizations where a large group of developers, as well as third-party developers, are involved in building applications.
Let's a take a look at some of the key providers of cloud-based PaaS offerings today and discuss the important developments in this space over the past year.
App Cloud combines Heroku, Force.com and Lightning, plus a host of other services from Salesforce. Salesforce hasn't been able to gain much traction using its homebred PaaS offerings, Force.com and Lightning. But Heroku, which was acquired by Salesforce a few years ago, is one of the earliest PaaS vendors, and its presence alone adds gravity to the App Cloud offering. Heroku is a mature PaaS platform with support for many programming languages and a hybrid infrastructure. Heroku is probably the first name that comes to mind for any developer considering a PaaS platform, and that isn't about to change anytime soon. Yet, Salesforce App Cloud can't rely on the legacy of Heroku to win at PaaS. Salesforce pioneered the era of SaaS, but it's left to be seen if it can do a repeat with PaaS.
Google App Engine (GAE) was the first cloud service of the Google Cloud Platform. It became the preferred platform for social and game apps, like Snapchat and Angry Birds. Unlike startups such as Twitter that were plagued with downtime during their first few years, apps that were powered by GAE had little or no such issues. Google App Engine's ability to automate load balancing and scale was ideally suited for these resource-constrained startups. GAE is not as open as Heroku, having a proprietary SQL database and APIs. However, it greatly simplifies launching and scaling your app compared to IaaS options like Amazon Web Services (AWS). On the downside, GAE had one notable outage last year, which took down 21% of its apps, including Snapchat. This is an outlier. In the PaaS offerings arena, this platform is otherwise rock solid and is one of the frontrunners.
AWS rules in the world of IaaS, and it also offers a PaaS solution called Elastic Beanstalk. One reason to go with Elastic Beanstalk is its integration with other AWS services, like the DynamoDB NoSQL database, CloudWatch for monitoring, Simple Storage Service for storage and Identity and Access Management for access control. If you've run your infrastructure on AWS in the past