New Stocks, New Hope?

Wow, what a dreary week in the stock market. Jubak had an interesting article on "the plan" by our new Treasury Secretary (Treasury may save the day after all). The bad bpart about the week for me was that I had a bunch of preferred stocks, that were generally down about 15 to 20%. They didn't seem very preferred this week. They are generally in the insurance industry, but I think they got thrown out with the bathwater in the general stomping of Financial stocks.

Can you believe AIG is at 54 cents? C at $1.95? BAC at $3.79? No one clearly has any confidence these stocks will survive. You have to tip your antlers to the Moose (Moosecalls) which said move to 100% gold two weeks ago. Since then gold is up 9% and SPY is down 11%. Good call Moose!

My mechanical portfolio continues to outperform the S&P and the Magic Diligence portfolio. The stocks added since Nov 21st are up 14.5%. Pretty good, as not much is up generally speaking. The MP will be adding two new stocks on Monday and I think both are worthy of a long look for my portfolio.

DELL - I have discussed buying them several times in the past. Now they are on the top 25 list and given that they are a quality company at $8.41 makes me want to put my entire receding net worth in them. I just ordered a new dell myself last week. Also Prem Watsa himself is a buyer. I think there is a substantial margin of safety here. Heck, they even have $5b of excess cash on hand!

		dell
+	Operating Income After Depreciation	3,671.00
-	Minority Interest - Income Account	6.00
=	Income for Calculation	3,665.00
	Market Cap Yahoo	16,350,000
	Share Price	8.41
+	Market Cap Calc	16,350.00
+	Preferred Capital	-
+	Debt in Current Liabilities	266.00
+	Long-Term Debt	1,851.00
	Cash and Short-Term Investments	8,819.00
-	Excess Cash	5,379.00
=	Enterprise Value	13,088.00
+	Property Plant and Equipment - Net	2,458.00
+	Receivables	7,058.00
+	Inventories	1,109.00
+	Other Current Assests	4,548.00
+	Working Cash	3,440.00
-	Accounts Payable	9,475.00
-	Current Liabilities - Other	6,680.00
=	Invested Capital	2,458.00
	Earnings Yield	28%
	ROIC	149%

The second stock is the first solar company I have seen show up besides WFR. SOLR is an extremely inexpensive solar company based in New Hampshire. I don't know much about them. Their earnings seem a bit uneven, but at $4.22 they are trading at 6x 2009 expected earnings. They also have no debt and cash on hand. If Obama does much pro-solar, they could do ok in the downturn. I think you could do worse than SOLR and may consider buying next week (I will certainly buy Dell in next two weeks).

Maybe March will be better!