An old friend who works in the oil industry has notified me that a lot of his colleagues are throwing all their money into gulf keystone petroleum (gkp).

After reading up on it I noticed in the past week there was large rumours of a bid from company Exxon, in which rumours were they were going to offer 5 times the current share price to get there hands on gkps oil reserves, i hear its extremely rare for an offer to be over 50% mark up on a current share price.

These are not just random small rumours, the share price opened 28% up one day in the week just gone.

I guess im alerting you to this share, it could be an incredible investment, but if not in the hope someone will get back to me on their thoughts about the share, it seems almost to good to be true, which as i have generally found means it often is.

Going to start reading through ALEX's 10-k.

Also, has anyone read Marty Whitman's works? I feel like he has good points but a lot of times I find myself confused by his writing.

I have thought about NICK as well. Cheap stock but the warning I would give is that auto charge-offs have been at unsustainable secular lows (there have even been negative monthly figures) because used car prices increased sharply which was a boon to repo prices. Subprime and near-prime auto is a very fragmented market with a lot of small private/regional players. In addition a lot of regional banks left this business in 2007-8 but are re-entering to try and pick up some loan growth.

I looked through it briefly and did a quick preliminary valuation on some assets and got:

Shipping: $800m-$1b
Operating Real Estate: $800m
Land: $800m

This gets us to about $2.4B in value vs. an EV of 2.28B. This excludes $100's of million in developmental real estate. There's still a lot of questions to be answered with the biggest being how much is the developmental real estate worth? I haven't looked that hard into the shipping yet, but I think my valuation at $800m is at least somewhat conservative. I definitely see enough value to continue investigating.

I only spent about 10 minutes looking at this stock, but it doesn't appear to be a value or long term investment. It looks like a classic story stock. The story may come true or it might not, but it looks to me like a lot of the plus side is already built into the price anyway. I'm pretty conserative so it's not something I'm really interested in.

Care to talk in more length on why CCJ and not some other uranium company?

Seriously considering initiating a large position in BAM. I'll try to post some of my thoughts and would love to hear a ton of feedback. One of primary reasons for investing is a great management that is very shareholder friendly.

just bought some T. pretty sure i slow ponied it by a week-10 days. story of my life really. but 5.8% div eases some of that pain.

looking at ABT and FRD. Both offer dividends (3.4% and 4.7% respectively). I feel like ABT is close to its high price and not sure its going towards 58-60. Kind of would like to see it pull back towards support like in the 54 range. FRD is starting to gain momentum after 2mos of breakeven. This seems promising.

Thoughts on any of these 3?

Thanks.

just subscribing.

What do you guys think of CME? Looks like a great buy opportunity to me.

I do not have sophisticated reasoning. I view cameco as best-in-the-business for Uranium mining companies and have followed them for the past three years. I haven't compared them to other similar uranium companies over the same time period. I wish I had more to offer you, but I dont. What other companies are you looking at?

I wrote a few prelim thoughts on FRD previously:

"I was just looking at FRD. It looks attractive with a lot of cash and no debt. Also, they have two business segments and one has just turned around because they only have one customer who shut down a factory and reopened sometime in the last 2 years (from what I remember). It looks like it has a value of at least 100m and is currently trading at ~75m. I'm unsure of any catalyst other than an improved economy, but you'll collect a >4.5% yield while waiting. I have done all my homework here yet, but it is something I'm putting on my radar (ahnuld has a pretty good write up on his site about this company)."

It seems like you are a yield investor. I don't really have any insight regarding that kind of strategy.

What resources do you guys use to screen for stocks? Think we had bloomberg in undergrad, but is there any legit free website I can use from home? Canadian market as well preferably. Thx!

finviz.com

You've made my head explode, Biesterfield. Please PM me any other suggestions. I am trying to teach myself about investing and stock trading.

Companies I want to read the newest 2 Annual Reports of this year:

AAWW, GLW, MMUS, DIT, BH, RDI, PETS, DSX, IDCC. Also want to read GRPN and P just to hear them pretend like they are worth as much as the market thinks they are.

I also wanna hear what some real big smart companies have to say like IBM, GOOG, DIS, maybe some others that I can't think of (suggestions?) even though I'm almost certainly not going to buy them, just to know what they have to say about whatever is going on in their particular space. All the ones I can think of seem tech related pretty much. I guess there's some obvious names in energy I could read about but I'd rather look elsewhere currently.

I'd read BAM and BRK's.

GE is a really big smart company's stock that I own that usually has an interesting annual report, and I think previous poster already suggested Berkshire Hathaway as Warren Buffett's annual letters are legendary.

thanks D@A_C. not really a yield invester per se. looking for best investments, dividend or no dividend. but when you suck at picking stocks that move up in price, the yield comes in handy. :-)

TSRA up 51.34% since October 4th when I suggested I thought it was looking cheap in in the trading thread. Not sure where I'm gonna be willing to sell but I'm not quite there yet. I'll let them report some quarters.

I had been considering take a position in BVSN it was trading significantly under net cash (but was losing $$ each quarter albeit a small amt). For anyone who doesn't know BVSN it was a portal (big back in the day) solutions company which in the hey day of the internet bubble 1.0 was worth $30 Billion!
When it was trading around $8 per share its market cap was $38 million or so. The discount I think is due mainly to the fact that the CEO Dr. Pehong Chen (though old) is ridiculously egotistical (thinks he can bring his company back to his former glory?) and is likely to never sell. Anyways it's interesting b/c the stock seems to have been caught up in some PUmp (and possibly dump) and has soared over the last month or so to $17.

Biesterfield, is it too late for comments about your DELL write-up? If not...

1. I would like to see the math behind your revenue growth numbers and your assumed margins in each of your scenarios (i.e., in your upside case, how will they achieve revenue growth of 3%--will all segments grow at that rate, or will some segments advance by more and others by less, and why? and, in your downside case, why and how exactly will margins contract 100bps? and, what will the absolute level of operating expenses be under each of the scenarios?).

2. I agree with DOOM's comment about adding more competitive analysis.

3. I would prefer to see the same base year EPS used for each of your scenarios.

4. Are you an MBA student who is trying to find a full-time job? I hope so, because I made these comments based on that being true and my history of applying for investment jobs as an MBA student.

BTW: you don't have to post the answers to these here. I just wanted to point out that these are the things I'd ask you if I were interviewing you.

Yes not too late. I pitched Dell verbally in mock interviews twice now and need to analyze the competition more. Also get more info on a catalyst and the math behind my assumptions as you say. Looking into SOTP valution. Yes MBA student.

You should probably adjust your numbers for securitization when doing your ratio analysis.

I would not buy FRD at these levels. If I still owned it id sell now above 12.