Wednesday, October 14, 2009

A L M O S T T H E R E

I am about one point away from breakeven. It has been quite a comeback. To be down about 60% (think 40 cents) and to get back to down 1% (think 99 cents) is quite a run. In real dollars, it is a ton of money for me, so I am happy as I thought it could be 3 or 4 years before I regained my losses.

Here is my current portfolio and the percent gains:

WILC 215%
UTA 90%
CKSW 268%
UEPS 71%
QXM 25%
HCKT 46%
CBI 40%
ENDP 43%
BR 29%
GME 24%
AIRV 14%
KHD 12%
BKE 30%
AMED 25%
PFE 24%
BIOC 18%
GTLS 19%
WH 24%
FRX 28%
CEU 13%
PVSW 17%
CSKI 8%
WTW 7%
KSW 5%
RTN 3%
QCOR 3%
PRIM 2%
GIGM -4%
JCOM -6%
JTX -4%
CHCG -8%
CMED -13%

HCKT was a huge gainer today, up about 8%. CEU was up almost 10% and PSVW was up about 6%. All are mechanical picks, I may add. I saw CSCO was buying STAR today, so the M&A activity, which I think is critcal for the bull run of these value stocks continues.

I did add a new stock today: LIWA. It is not on the list and has already had a pretty good run. But when I did my pro-forma calculations I got a EY of about 14% and ROIC of 100%, which would likely qualify it as a top 50 stock. I don't think it is on as the data only has three quarters, so I had to estimate the missing quarter. Here are its stats:



liwa
+ Operating Income After Depreciation 26.05
- Minority Interest - Income Account -
= Income for Calculation 26.05

Diluted Shares Outstanding 21.818

Share Price 9.12
+ Market Cap Calc 198.98
+ Preferred Capital 13.12
+ Debt in Current Liabilities 4.39
+ Long-Term Debt -

Cash and Short-Term Investments 28.85
- Excess Cash 28.85
= Enterprise Value 187.64






+ Property Plant and Equipment - Net 16.36
+ Receivables 8.46
+ Inventories 7.92
+ Other Current Assests 0.17
+ Working Cash -
- Accounts Payable 5.12
- Current Liabilities - Other 0.57
= Invested Capital 27.22
Earnings Yield 14%
ROIC 96%

The draw of course is how they're growing their revenues and earnings. Here are the past three quarters, with the top line being revenues and the bottom line operating income:

Q2 2009 Q1 2009 Q4 2008 Q3 2008
6/30/2009 3/31/2009 ####### 9/30/2008
48.827 20.539 25.237 20.1375
38.796 14.609 15.772 12.971
1.68 0.746 1.754 1.1645
8.351 5.184 7.711 6.002

Today they just announced increased capacity (Lihua International Announces Production Capacity Expansion), from 550 metric tons a month of copper wire to 1,250 metric tons. It is a risky play for me, but I do think the stock has strong upside.

On another tangent, I am considering a new spin portfolio which makes a bit of fun of Cramer's "Are You Diversified"? It is hard to read anything financial related without worrying about inflation and the US dollar. Check out the following headlines:

They are all in parallel with my comments about a month ago about the Peter Schiff Book: "The Little Book of Bull Moves in Bear Markets". After I read that book, I started a hypothetical portfolio with the kind of stocks he would recommend: commodities, foreign utilities and such. Since I set it up, it is up 11.4% while the Russell 3000 is up 6.3%.

My thought was to create a diversified portfolio, with at least one stock per continent (geographical diversification) and then various industries. Here are some stocks I am considering, I probably would not start this until 2010, though I might start buying some of the stocks this fall:

UEPS - South Africa MFI stock
FSUMF - Australian Iron Ore stock
IBN - Indian Bank
TEVA - Israeli Generic Pharmaceutical
HBMFF - Canadian Gold/Zinc mining company
CIG - Brazilan Utility
EN - Italian Utility
STA - Norwegian Oil & Gas
SLB - French Drilling Company
NOK - Finnish Telephone manufacturer

Of course I also have LIWA, CEU, CHCG, CEU, CMED, WILC, KHD, CBI, QXM, UTA, WH and GIGM; plus Moose pick EPP. I have to say that KHD at $10.57 strikes me as an extremely cheap stock right now and is squarely positioned to benefit if we get a V shape in Asia and parts of Europe. Keep in mind they have more cash than their market cap, $11.92 per share.

Enough rambling.

3 comments:

Homer315 said...

KHD's cash isn't really cash though is it? I remember some discussion, whether it was on here on another blog I visit, about how the cash that shows up on the balance sheet is not really KHD's.

OK, I found it -- it was written up on VIC on 11/14/07 and the discussion talks about the cash back then. More than half the cash they had back then was either customer deposits or required by banks for letters of credit/bonding, etc. The cash that shows up on the balance sheet is misleading. I own the stock, and think it's a decent value, but it doesn't really have that much case, and the filings show a commensurate liability.

BTW Marsh, did you ever apply to be a member of VIC?

Marsh_Gerda said...

Homer - thanks for the clarification. I may dig a bit further into that as the offset needs to be on the balance sheet as well. Would it be Accounts Payable? I have not applied with VIC, though the stock I was going to write-up (ACE) has done very well.

MG

Homer315 said...

BTW, I was on DaveinHackensack's blog, and he asked me why my blog profile was private, and I told him that I did the minimum to sign up so that I could post comments on some people's blogs (who did not allow anonymous postings). Anyway, so when I clicked on my profile to see what, if any, information was available, it asked me to input a user name, which I had heretofor neglected to do.

So Homer, in this case, is the artist formally known as Albert.