Some of my more loyal reader(s) will recall that one of the very first stocks I suggested on our site was Qwest, on the grounds that it had on the order of $750 million in depreciation expenses that was not being made up for with additional capital expenditures. Considering that the firm has a P/E […]
Poe said that the best place to hide something is in plain sight, and Peter Lynch suggested in his One Up on Wall Street that the reader’s own consumption patterns could provide a source of candidate companies. And, in keeping with our theme, we should give consideration to a company that sells fruit. Chiquita Brands […]
Some of you may recognize our old friend Hoggy the Yield Hog over there, whom I last mentioned in the context of Breitburn Energy. I took the position that colossal plunge in unit price since the partnership announced that it was suspending distributions was entirely unjustified. The partnership was still making money; it was just […]
They do say that small cap companies, which are not commonly followed by Wall Street analysts or even portfolio managers for a variety of economic reasons, are a fertile hunting ground for underpriced stocks. Although this effect has somewhat diminished since it was discovered, as most facts on Wall Street inevitably are (apart from the […]
I was reading a book about structured finance lately, which talked about the enormous advances that have been made in leasing. It is possible, through these companies and their special purpose entities to arrange the leasing of an entire factory and its contents, for years, without recording any of it as a liability or, worse, […]
I recently purchased Value Investing by Montier. It’s an interesting book, but it seems to focus more on behavioral finance issues and value investing philosophy than actual techniques. Now, of course, no one describes their investing style as “behavioral finance,” but to a large degree every investment philosophy depends on exploiting some mistake that most […]
I have spoken highly in the past of a stock selling for less than its net working capital with the additional criterion that the firm be profitable. On top of the attractiveness of the stock recovering at least to its asset value, the net working capital level serves as a price floor, thus reducing the […]
A great deal of value investing is the process of elimination. Warren Buffett, when asked how he finds undervalued stocks, simply replied “Start with the A’s.†But in most markets only a small fraction of securities count as underpriced on an absolute basis, so value investing requires wading through an endless sea of crap in […]
The trouble with getting in on the ground floor of a new technology is that you never know how tall the building is going to be. Too many investors confuse technological brilliance with competitiveness, and a typical example of that is Rentech Inc. On the whole I’ve never been too excited about technology for its […]
Since I last proposed Callon Petroleum bonds, and following my success with the Bon-Ton junk bonds, I’ve been considering focusing more attention on this part of the market. Junk bonds, of course, offer massive yields, higher than nearly all dividend-paying stocks and certainly higher than normal bonds; however, defaults are a constant worry and the […]