9 April 2008 – The Aleph Blog

Industry Ranks April 2008

Posted on 9 April 200810 April 2008 by David Merkel

Okay, here are my industry ranks for April 2008. Please remember that my model can be used in value mode (the green zone) or in momentum mode (the red zone). I usually just stick to the green zone, but this time I included a few red zone ideas. So, this time I added in technology companies, insurance, industrial and healthcare companies. Yeah, I know that’s a lot, and my results reflected that — usually I have just 20 or so companies from the screen, but this time it is 80+.

Oh, my screen, aside from industry, has only two factors: market cap greater than $100 million, and Price-to-book times Price-to-forward earnings must be less than 10. Ben Graham had a similar criterion, except that he used trailing P/E, and his cutoff was 22.5. Here are the tickers:

ABG ACGL ACMR ACW ADPI AEL AFFM AGYS AHL AIG AMSF ARM AWH AXS BBW BC BRLC BRNC CBR CHUX CLS CMOS CNA CVGI DK EDS ENH ENSG FFG FL FLEX FMR FRPT GPI HMX HOTT HTRN IKN INDM IPCR IRF KEM KG LAD LNY LTR MENT MIG MRH MRT MWA MXGL NCS NNBR NSIT NSTC NYM OCR ODP PCCC PDFS PKOH PLAB PMACA PNX PRE PSS PTP RE RMIX RNR ROCK RTEC SAF SAH SANM SEAB SMP SNX TECUA THG TRS TRW TRX UAM UNM XL XRIT

Lots of insurers — what can I say, the group is cheap… cheaper than the lack of pricing power should make them. Add in two more tickers that crossed my desk today: MRO and AWI, and I think I am ready to put my spreadsheet together and start analyzing promising cheap companies. One nice thing about my methods is that it can accommodate a large number of tickers. When you add up the tickers from yesterday and today, and add in the 32 existing tickers, that’s almost 300 tickers altogether.

Fortunately, my ranking system helps my winnow down the list pretty quickly, as it scores cheapness on a wide number of variables at once, and throws in many of the anomalies that are mispriced in the markets. Then it is up to me to use business judgment to decide what makes sense, because most cheap stocks are cheap for a reason, while the gems are merely overlooked.

Feel free to pitch in more stock ideas. I should come to decisions within a week or so.

PS — Have you checked out Newsflashr.com yet? It looks like a promising way of aggregating financial news, as well as other news.

The Financings of Last Resort

Posted on 9 April 2008 by David Merkel

After seeing the amazing “refinancings” done by entities like MBIA, Thornburg, WaMu, and Rescap, I felt it was right to comment on last-ditch financing methods, so that you can recognize desperation (if it’s not obvious already).? Here are some methods:

Borrow money using a healthy subsidiary while limiting capital flows up to the less than healthy holding company (e.g., MBIA) .
Do a rights offering at a significant discount, diluting existing shareholders if they don’t participate.
Offer common stock at a significant discount to a private buyer (perhaps with warrants), diluting existing shareholders, but perhaps allowing the company a chance to play again another day. (e.g. WaMu, Thornburg).
Offer a convertible bond/preferred to monetize the volatility of the stock price, contingently diluting existing shareholders. (e.g. Lehman, Citigroup, Merrill)

With the exception of the first one, all of these dilute existing shareholders, usually driving the stock price down in the short run, unless the removal of fear of bankruptcy is the dominant factor.? With the first one, it is an example of structurally subordinating lenders to the holding company, who now lose “first dibs” on the value of the healthy subsidiary.

I try to avoid companies that do financings like these, or are likely to do them.? They have a high default rate.? And what goes for the stock here, goes triple for the corporate bonds, where you have all of the downside of the stock, and little of the upside, if the company should manage to survive.