With each passing quarter, the talk about what Apple (AAPL) will do with its growing "cash" hoard keeps heating up. The truth is, the cash Apple generates is already largely being put to work. Perhaps it's not being put to work in the way shareholders and analysts would like it to be (dividend, buyback, etc.), but the money isn't sitting in cash. Instead, Apple has gone on a shopping spree, buying up debt securities.

The reason I put the word cash in quotation marks in the previous paragraph is because according to the company's latest 10-Q, it officially has $3.956 billion in cash. The remainder of the $97.601 billion (fair value total) is spread out among various securities, broken down into Level 1 assets ($4.698 billion) and Level 2 assets ($88.947 billion). I don't consider any of my bond holdings (whether shorter or longer term) to be cash, and Apple

The latest news for Blackberry [Research In Motion (RIMM)] has not been all that positive. The top management is going through transitions. Meanwhile, Apple's (APPL) iPhone and Google's (GOOG) Android phones are have fantastic years. Blackberry is a pure play in the phone business. Rather than single product companies, Apple and Google make products in diverse electronics and software areas. This makes the oligopoly comparison more difficult. Other weaker players such as Nokia and Sony Ericson seem to be smaller niche players now. They once were powerhouses and innovators in the cell phone market. Will Blackberry become as irrelevant as Nokia (NOK) and Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson or just Ericsson (ERIC)? The marketplace has changed dramatically. In this article the Z-Score model for bankruptcy will be applied to see how bad things are getting for Blackberry. Each ratio will analyze. Hopefully, using the trends in this model's score will shed some

A 10-year chart of Microsoft (MSFT) is not a pretty site. Excluding dividends, shares are down a little over 10%, and the PE has contracted from above 40 to, at times, below 10. In the same time period, Microsoft has gone from a Wall Street tech darling that dominated computing to a dinosaur, legacy tech company. Regardless of how accurate such a description may be, investors have in droves fled to Apple (AAPL), which makes innovative consumer devices that have impressed the masses.

During this same time period, Microsoft has had a few wins, including Windows 7, continued excellence with its Office products, Xbox and Kinect. Throughout the same period we've also seen the Zune, unsuccessful tablets, a weak mobile strategy, and Windows Vista. Clearly, it's been a bit of a mixed bag. But we look toward the future for profitable investments, and we think it looks pretty promising at

Is it just me or is this 2012 starting to look like it will be the year that chip makers such as Texas Instruments (TXN) regain their pre-2001 form? In fact, it is not that far-fetched to think that the semiconductors might be the surest derivative plays on the market today - and yet another way to buy into the unrelenting assault on the PC industry that was lead by both Apple (AAPL) and Google's (GOOG) smart phone devices dominance.

The growing popularity of smart phones and tablets has placed not only the brand names such as Google and Apple at a significant advantage, but also the brands that are inside these devices themselves. Speaking of "inside" this is where Intel (INTC) once grew to prominence at the rise of the PC. So it stands to reason that the same effect will occur for the companies that are "inside" the

In a recent article, I talked about the commitment that I was making not only toward becoming more diversified in my portfolio, but also I was going to focus on some dividend players on the market. The issue of dividends has proven to be a very sensitive topic of late as there continues to be a huge separation between those that favor growth over income - or vice-versa. It seems that we can't all agree and I appreciate that, because we are not all the same and therefore don't have equal objectives in mind.

However, the unifying quality is that we are all investors and by virtue, risk takers. But another thing that we can agree on is that companies that pay dividends do tend to be less risky, and the payouts are a great way to re-invest and mitigate risk and losses. So to that end, (as promised) here