Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Final Day for Cherokee

First thanks to a few of my readers for posting to try and raise my spirits. That was considerate. I'll start this blog on a positive note. CHKE celebrated its last day in my portfolio today. Overall up about 20% with another 5 to 6% in dividends. Not sexy, but I'd take an entire portfolio of stocks like that. Here is the birthday chart to celebrate ==>

While CHKE is still an MFI stock, I decided not to keep it in my portfolio. Rather I will be using the proceeds to increase my positions in a bunch of my May 31st stocks coming up on their one year anniverary (and possibly MTEX next week). Heck, I have lost so much with OVTI, that I'd need most of CHKE to make it whole!

Yesterday I was right about lamenting on Ezenia's earnings. This morning I compared the wording with the previous quarter release. They definitely expanded the gloom and doom from 1st half of 2007 to "all of 2007". That was a 14% haircut. Down to $1.50. It should not go much lower with 85 cents a share in cash. But clearly these quarters with no earnings will remove it shortly from MFI screens. I will hold it into June, but may sell a bit before anniversary date. At least I'll get some ST losses to offset that short-term gain from AVCI! Woo-hoo!

TGB OTOH did well today. I felt they had strong earnings and they went up 3.6%. This is still a cheap stock. As long as commodity prices stay strong, I can see TGB going from $3.16 to $4.00. The fact that they are in a much more stable country (Canada) has to make them more attractive.

I remember reading in Phil Town's book that people "feel" they influence the market. If they buy a stock and it goes down, they rationalize that it went down because they bought it. Of course, unless we have some closet billionaires out there, we make no difference as individuals. So I am going to sop thinking that I am snake bit and let the magic formula work its magic. And I do have some sizeable winners in my non MFI portfolio (actually they are all winners):

AIG: +8%
AXS: +48%
DVN: +27%
PTP: +15%
PVD: +21%
STP: +31%
TEVA: +20%
My Company: +38%

All of these are less than a year. There, I feel better!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hopefully Ezenia will regain some of its value in its last month in your portfolio after the shock of the bad earnings news wears off. You're right that it has a strong cash position, but the stock is still trading at twice book value, so I don't think we've reached the floor just yet. The 27% decrease ($1 mil) in revenue from Q1 '06 was largely contributable to the decline of a single product line, InfoWorkSpace ($900 thous). And as stated in the press release, 3/4 of this decline came from the non-renewals of government buyers. I'd be eager to hear in the conference call if they expect these gov revenues to continue to slide.

Don't know what else they have in the pipeline to replace InfoWorkSpace. But it seems like they've recognized the need to find new products. They've recently brought on new personnel in the marketing dept. They also increased R&D by 60% in Q1 to $527 thousand.

But unless something else comes out of the conference call, I don't see any catalyst in the short term. I think you're right to sell at the one-year mark--much better opportunities out there.