Satellite Radio Playground

by Demian Russian

Jessica Caldwell

With Sirius XM’s (NASDAQ: SIRI) stock price hovering around a dollar and the Russell rebalancing snapshot being taken at tomorrow’s close, investors may be looking for any good news that they can get. Sirius XM’s stock needs to close at $1.00 or higher on Friday to qualify for this year’s Russell rebalancing. Being added to the index would create “forced” institutional buying for the funds that track the Russell Index. Well some investors may have been looking for some kind of catalyst to come out of the company’s Annual Meeting of Stockholders today, external news is showing that auto sales, which are so important to Sirius XM’s subscriber growth, are looking to be positive for May.

Edmunds released their official May forecast for auto sales today. Their forecast for an 11.4 million SAAR for May is consistent with their earlier projection on May 20th, and would be a month-over-month increase from April’s 11.2 million SAAR. Edmunds is forecasting for 1,080,200 total vehicles to be sold in May, which translates to an almost 11% increase over last month and an almost 18% increase year-over-year from May 2009.

This forecast is also consistent with what Jessica Caldwell disclosed last night in an exclusive interview with Playground Radio. In last night’s interview, Caldwell maintained her projection for full-year 2010 U.S auto sales to come in at around 11.5 million units. She also gave her thoughts on longer term projections, seeing more of a gradual recovery and viewing A.T Kearney’s projection for over 16 million vehicles sold in 2012 as being “aggressive”. Read More