Lame Lehman

For like the past 100 years Lehman picks their 10 best stock ideas in the summer. Over time, their picks have generally done well. But check out the performance of their picks from the summer of 2005:

Symbol	Shrs	Price Paid	Trade	Gain
ALL	85	59.73	53.61	-520.20 $520.20	10.25%
AMAT	300	16.86	16.22	-192.00 $192.00	3.80%
BBBY	100	43.28	34.17	-910.99 $910.99	21.05%
DELL	130	39.57	23.84	-2,044.90 $2,044.90	39.75%
DJ	130	37.37	33.89	-452.39 $452.39	9.31%
FRE	80	65.64	57.29	-667.99 $667.99	12.72%
MSFT	200	25.15	22.82	-466.00 $466.00	9.26%
PFE	180	27.15	23.01	-745.20 $745.20	15.25%
PD	100	48.28	76.23	2,795.01 $2,795.01	57.89%
WMT	100	48.43	48.07	-36.00 $36.00	0.74%
Total (USD):	-	-	-	-3,240.66 $3,240.66	6.57%

Of their 10 picks, only one (PD) is in the green. I am sure the DOW and S&P 500 are up over the same period (actually, I show the S&P 500 is up 4.2%). Look at DELL, down almost 40%! Hard to believe. LEH has their experts from every area of research pick these stocks and they are known for good research. This is what they came up with... maybe they should try MFI this year! Now I remember, these are called their "10 Uncommon Values". Their new list should be coming out any day, always near the end of June. I will post it here and we'll track it and see if they can't improve a little bit.

Wait, wait, I found their picks for 2006 (Uncommon Values Portfolio for 2006):
ADP, COF, EXC, GLW, INTU, JNJ, OCR, PD, RGC and UTX. The picks were official June 20th. So I will begin my tracking as of that date. The 2005 picks ended up down 4.6% vs S&P up 2.6%. Where is a dart board when you need one?

Very little stock news for me this morning. FTO splits, hard to get excited about that. I will be curious to see if TGIS gets back in the nifty fifty with their 12% drop yesterday and whether that bumps the stock back up.

Hmmm, it is late in the day. TGIS does not appear to be on the list today. It did bounce back though (up 8%) despite a dreary day in the market. I am gaining ground on the benchmark indices, but it is a hollow victory when I lose ground on cash.

Stock Stories:

TRLG got some positive press from MF (Why This Stock Is a Winner) and was actually up 2%.
FTO split today and got an analyst upgrade (Frontier Oil upgraded by Friedman Billings) all good for +3.7%.
UST had an article run by MF discussing how dividend stocks do well. They have only run that story or some permutation of it 10,000 times, so I won't bore you with the link.

Rambling Thoughts - I heard where Google is going to enter Ebay's space. I am amazed that Google thinks they can do it all. I am unconvinced. Yes, they have a nice search engine. I do like Picasa. I hear their Gmail is nice. But Google Finance is so-so. Their willingless to download clones of Microsoft Office for free has actually already been done (openoffice). I think Ebay will beat them, that is tough turf to take. I wonder what is next? A Google Browser? I do see that Ebay was down 5% on the news.

Warning! Complaining Paragraph Ahead!

I re-visited the 5 stocks I added at the end of May, down an average of 14% in this carnage we call "June". The two "high fliers" are OVTI (-25%) and ORCT (-21%). Wow. You have to really work hard to drop that much in a month. ORCT just blows my mind. This stock was at $30 earlier this year. They did push back one order, but they still expect to earn between $0.68 & $1.20. Granted, that is a wide range... but $9.33 a share??? I may have to scrounge a few nickels from Mrs. Justadrone as that is a fire sale if I ever saw one. I will wager right now that ORCT doubles within the next 12 months. And don't get me started on OVTI. They are growing revenues at 20%, have their products in all the cool gadgets yet they're trading at under 12x next year's earnings? That is fine. I can wait. I knew OXY at $72 was cheap in October. I knew FMD was cheap at $27 in December. I knew PCU was cheap at $51 in October. Not to mention OMG at $13 in November (ok, you got me... I did mention it).
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Whew! That felt good. The stock market gets just so darned stupid from time-to-time, but I guess that is what gives us opportunities to do well. It just gets a little frustrating from time-to-time.

Final closing thought, I promise. I wonder if ORCT has dropped more because it is an Israeli stock and things are heating up there. CHKP is another MFI stock and is down sharply of late as is TEVA. Thoughts? Buying opportunity?