Value Investing News

We still feel uncomfortable about highlighting specif stocks seeing market conditions and possible unintended ramifications of problems with global financial/insurance conglomerates. At the moment, a lot of companies are very vulnerable to events completely out of their hands and more importantly, that they really cannot foresee.

As everyone is reporting, Buffett states that he sees the economy “in shambles throughout 2009 — and for that matter, probably well beyond,” …. however, as usual, he remains optimistic and true to his investment philosophy and the fact that he still can’t answer the question on whether the stock market will rise or fall.

Rio Tinto has an extremely high quality range of assets and once up and running, these assets are low cost and long life deals. Like most miners, they have been suffering with the extreme correction in commodity prices but - at this stage of the cycle - all the fundamentals look great ....

We feel that JNJ is worth studying as a long-term play for any portfolio. JNJ is a blue chip company that:

* Operates in one of the fastest growing sectors in the global economy.
* Has great balance sheet with a track record of strong performance and healthy dividends.
* Is trading at a very reasonable multiple.

Some of our readers have been asking for us to highlight some interesting companies that they could study in more detail. We plan to start a series of short posts that will give you a quick overview of some companies we feel are worth looking into.

Rest assured that the commodity boom is not over, we believe that prices will probably start to pick up again in late 2009, most probably coinciding with the start of a long and difficult economic recovery process.

Has anyone been keeping track of DLBs performance? Here is a chart comparing it to the total market (using the Vanguard Total Martket ETF - VTI) and to a mid cap growth benchmark (using the Mid Cap 400 ETF - IJK) for the past 2 year performance...

As our regular readers know, we are not in the buying mood but we wanted to post this interesting chart of Safety Insurance (SAFT). Despite being a terrible year for the markets, it seems that SAFT hasn’t done too bad…we have written about this company in the past, hence the update.

Some of our readers have asked us about how we would go about constructing a diversified ETF portfolio. Naturally, it always depends on what your ultimate investing goals are, your age, what percentage of your liquid net-worth will be invested in the portfolio, etc, etc… However, we thought that we would offer our view on what we feel could be a starting-point for a well-balanced option.

We know that this could be a controversial screen with some of our readers but we still think that it is an interesting way to get some additional names for your short-list to analyze in more detail… at the end of the day, it’s all about trying to find new ideas!

It’s been a while since we ran one of our screens! In the midst of all this turmoil and our continued posts on looking for Small Cap Value, some of our readers have asked us about interesting opportunities in the S&P.

With most of the commentary focused on the financial industry and the economy at large, we thought it could be useful to highlight the kind of market cap destruction that has hit the famous ‘Tech Trio’.

A bit off topic but quite funny / scary for Value Investors to see this live account of how things were and are, being done....

It is interesting to note that when we add the growth/value variable, value outperforms for both small cap and large caps stock and the performance gap increases exponentially all the way to small cap value.

Has anyone noticed that the MSCI EAFE Value Index (EFV) is trading at 2005 levels and is currently yielding over 6%?