UEPS rises! And other news...

Net 1 UEPS was up nearly 10% today! There doesn't appear to be any specific reason - no announcements, no news. I can only assume that millions of people read my previous posts analyzing UEPS. Clearly, they were convinced that UEPS is a great buy, and that sent the price straight up.

Williams Controls announced earnings today. They had increased in pretty much every way. Earnings were higher than last year, and higher than expected (by the one analyst that follows them). Sales had increased in the US and Europe, and increased dramatically in Asia. The share price hit a high of +3%, but settled back to +0.3%. Sheesh!

The other shoe dropped for ALNY. They announced how many shares they're going to sell, and that sent the price down 7%. I guess the difference between the situations of ALNY and ARNA was whether they had announced how much they're selling. Now they have been affected similarly by their announcements. Argh. Seems like I should have expected this, and should have profited from it. Oh well - I'll know for next time.

Finally, Walter had some things to say about the spin-off. It turns out that buying WLT will still allow participation in the Mueller spin-off. With a ~$16 price for MWA, and 1.65 shares of MWA per WLT, this means that each share of WLT will be worth ~$23 after the spin-off. Is this a fair value? I need to look into this a little more. Just notice, though, that the Market Cap of MWA is 1.8B, and that of WLT is 2.1B. WLT owns 75% of MWA, so the market is valuing WLT as ~$750M. With 43M shares, WLT is valued at ~$18 per share. Less than the spin-off value. Is this right?

My Experiment in LEAPs

I wondered a while back whether buying LEAPs would be a way to leverage the MFI for greater gains. On August 8, I recorded the 38 MFI stocks that had options available. For each stock, I recorded the close price, as well as the close price of Jan. '07, '08 and '09 LEAPs with a strike price just below the close price of the security. Now, 4 months later, using the close as of December 8, I have determined the change in security and derivative values. LEAP values that expire in Jan. '08 and '09 changed in close accordance with stock price. (Click on the figure, and all figures, to expand them.) As the Jan. '07 expiry date approached, the LEAPs changed in price, in many cases dramatically. Of the 32 stocks that had options expiring in Jan. '07, the mean ± SD was 0.51 ± 1.05. This is a huge gain in that period of time, but much greater variability. The median change in value was 12%.

Here's another way of looking at it: What is the fraction of LEAPs that changed by more than 10%? Figure 2 shows the distribution of LEAP by amount gained, as well as the gain for each category of LEAP. I think it is valid to then calculate an expected return: multiply the fraction in each category by the return of the category for an expected return in each category. By summing the expected returns of each category, you get the overall expected return, which is 17%.

Another way to do this, and probably the most accurate, is with a bootstrap method. Randomly generate portfolios of 5 LEAPs many times, and the average return of the portfolios is the expected return of this strategy. Using this strategy, the mean ± SD is 59.8% ± 41.4%, based on 50 portfolios. Only 3 of the 50 portfolios resulted in a loss, averaging -11% ± 6.5%. By comparison, 11 of the 50 porfolios ended up more than doubling, with average returns of 115% ± 17%.

Is there a correlation to Market Cap? Piotroski F-Score? There doesn't seem to be a correlation between either and returns. The distribution of returns by F-Score is pretty broadly distributed; there aren't really enough samples at most F-Scores to say. Similarly, if there is an effect of market cap, it is slight: the Pearson's coefficient of the curve fit suggests that market cap explains only ~2.5% of the variation - really not enough to be interesting for further study.

There are definite caveats to this. It's one sample of stocks, from a period when the general market is doing exceptionally well. This would really need more thorough backtesting to have a better idea whether using LEAPs of MFI stocks improve returns. But, this data suggests that there may be an advantage to buying LEAPs of MFI stocks as compared to the stocks themselves.

December buys, part I

My goal with this round of picks was to try two things: 1) to take a little more into account when buying stocks than just insider buying and 2) to try to analyze the stocks that I buy. #1 was solved by using the Piotroski F-Score to help me pick stocks. This is also a sort of short cut to #2, but only partly. So, in keeping with my previous analysis of MFI stocks, here's an analysis of the top 100 stocks with a market cap of at least $1M. (Actually, because of errors acquiring the F-Scores of a nuber of stocks, the actual sample size was 77.) It's a skewed distribution, weighted towards stocks with 'good' company characteristics, as defined by the F-Score. If you compare this distribution to that of my last analysis, there is a remarkable similarity (comparing to the distribution of companies with a market cap of at least $1M). Also, companies with higher F-Scores had larger market caps.

Of those 77, 22 had insider purchases. Only one of those had a Piotroski F-Score of 9, PACR, so I decided on that as a definite purchase. Three companies had a F-Score of 8, but of those, two had very low insider ownership. The last of these was WMCO, so that went on the list. FCX just announced the acquisition of PD, and there is a rumor of a takeover bid for FCX itself. Also, considering the size of FCX, it's insider ownership of ~5% seems pretty high. So with a F-Score of 7, FCX joined the list. The number of insider shares purchased by GVHR (620K!) got it added to the list, despite a F-Score of only 6. Finally, the excel add-in returned an error for F-Score of OFLX , but this article and the insider purchases (6 since June, by 5 separate officers of the company) got it on the list.

This is at best a partial success - let's face it, I'm still mechanically using F-Score as a proxy for fundamental analysis and I'm considering insider buying as a substitute for my own valuation. But it's a place to start. If you look at the logic above, insider buying still trumps fundamentals, too (GVHR got in with a 6, OFLX didn't have a clean analysis). So here's some fundamental analysis, using the questions outlined by Browne:

GVHR: Current assets : current liabilities are about even, but he'd prefer to see at least 2:1. LT assets are up ~ 30% compared to last year and up 10% compared to last quarter. LT liabilities are flat yoy, but appear to have been paid down somewhat since last quarter. PB is 4.3. Cost of revenue is not going up as quickly as revenue is, so there is more falling to the bottom line. Indeed, gross profit and EBIT are up yoy. Return on capital is 60%, a nice MFI number. Profit margins are flat, though.

FCX: Current assets are 2:1 with current liabilities, so that's good. LT assets are flat, while LT liabilities declined since last quarter. PB is ~12. ROC was huge last year, ~100%, but a more modest 28% the year before.

WMCO: Current assets to current liabilites are 1:1. LT assets are flat yoy, while LT liabilities declined nearly 40%. This is the first year of the last three that WMCO is profitable. EBIT was up 27% last year, and 17% the year before. ROC was huge.

(I didn't get to PACR or OFLX before this posting.)

The question is, do these analyses indicate that these companies are good or not? None of these seem to be as good as UEPS... does that mean that I have a skewed perspective of what is good, or is that a true, objective evaluation? I still have a lot to learn. Luckily, I am learning it in an up market, so mistakes are perhaps less costly than they could be.

OK, OK, if I'm making mistakes, they have, so far, been of the luckily good kind. But until I can do more fundamental analysis, it's just luck. Actually, it's statistics - since MFI stocks historically do well, and stocks with high insider buying historically do well, I am perhaps skewing my probabilities in the right direction.

WIld ride

Wow! I'm pretty amazed at how things have been going. I am trying very hard to remain skeptical, but my overall gain is pretty exciting.

I started my next round of buying today. It actually should have been last month, but something kept me from it then. So today I bought my next round of MFI picks. Probably Monday will be my next round of Motley Fool picks. Before discussing what's new, here's a rundown of my portfolios to date.

MFI is kicking butt. 4 of 10 stocks are up dramatically, while 3 are down, one a lot (ASPV, nearly 20%). VPHM is flying, with DECK, ASEI and WNR trailing. VPHM discussed prospects at two health science conferences a couple of weeks ago, and the shares just kept going up over the course of those couple of days. ASEI has also been doing great lately - i was up more than $4 the other day, although it gave back ~$1.50 the next day. Really, this doesn't seem to be on any specific news - maybe Mr. Market is starting to value ASEI more appropriately? Also, notice that MFI is trouncing the indices. Finally, my IRR for my MFI portfolio is 59%, based on 5 months of data. Too short to conclude anything, but a nice start nonetheless.

The Motley Fool portfolio is also doing very nicely. This porfolio seems a little more consistent: only 2 of 10 are down, and one of those is OYO the yo-yo. The rest are all up to various extents - it's still a large range, but even the least of them is significant - NATH at 8%. The IRR of my HG portfolio is 62.6%

There's my special situations portfolio. I haven't been discussing this much, because it has until recently been only one stock. I held on to LPMA after the merger, so now it's PAY. This stock has been doing nothing but rising since the merger closed - it is up ~20% since the deal closed Nov 1. I got very nervous when PAY stalled at around $32-33, and again when the earnings announcement approached. Now they're in the clear, earnings were good, and the announcement seems fine for the coming year. By a convenient coincidence, I'm reading The Warren Buffett Way by Robert Hagstrom. In it, he quotes Buffett as saying (and I'm paraphrasing) that if you know what the company is worth, then you decide the price; if you don't then the market decides the price. As nervous as I was about what to do with PAY, I realized that I don't have a sufficiently good understanding of the underlying fundamentals to decide whether Mr. Market is crazy and overvaluing or undervaluing PAY. What I'm still trying to figure out is, what do you do if the market is overvaluing the company? Sell and possibly miss out on more upside? Wait for a downturn and sell? Or sell part of the position? I've lately been listening to Jim Cramer's radio show (as a podcast), and his quote is, "Bulls make money, bears make money, but hogs get slaughtered." I wonder whether he'd tell me to take some off the table. PAY is currently the largest single position in my portfolio.

Lately, I've also become interested in TARR. It's in the dreaded housing industry. The PE is low (it was quite a bit lower when I first found the company in a stock screen), it trades near book value and it's got a high return on assets. Also, there have been a bunch of insider purchases, many of which were at prices well above where it trades now, and by several insiders. Last but not least, they are considering spinning off their homebuilding division by mid 2007. That was the icing on the cake. I do worry a little about how highly leveraged they are, but from what I've been hearing and reading, it sounds as though the housing industry is either near the bottom or possibly even just starting to turn around. If this is true, the TARR might be a great play, with a lot of potential upside. My total return on my special situations portfolio is 21%. I won't even mention the ridiculous IRR, because there's too little data in terms of total time (100 days) and total positions (2).

Finally, there's my biotech portfolio. It's full of surprises and disappointments. CBST continues to disappoint. It gapped down today, on a downgrade by Piper Jaffray. I'm not sure how much longer I will think that the market is wrong and maintain a large position in CBST. I do think that I'm right, and that it will turn a nice profit as cubicin starts to displace vancomycin (from VPHM). If I were really confident, I suppose I'd buy more, not consider selling. This is another position that requires that I do more research. CBST also announced that they'd partnered with AstraZeneca to distribute cubicin in China. It would have been nice had they thought they could bring the drug to that market, but the royalties will be alright. Both ARNA and ALNY have risen - ARNA dropped back down, but ALNY is just going higher and higher. What's interesting about the ALNY and ARNA stories is what's similar about them: they both announced that they'd sell shares. Why? The officers must believe that the shares are overvalued. The market ignored the ALNY announcement, but ARNA plummeted (still up overall, but down dramatically from their high). Now ARNA announced the sell price, and for some reason, the stock went to well above that price. Strange - I would have thought that would have set the price, rather than selling the bottom for the price. Anyway, the fact of the companies selling shares has made me wonder whether to sell as well. Or at least to take some off the table. ALNY especially has just kicked butt, mainly, I thought, because of the RNAI purchase and speculation that ALNY is also a buyout target. Not sure what I'll do for now.

As an aside to the discussion of my biotech portfolio, I have major seller's regret over MEDX. They have been going up like crazy over the last couple of weeks, and now yesterday one of their drugs was fast-tracked by the FDA. I'm considering getting back in MEDX, but in a several purchases at a time, so that I benefit if it goes down at all (another Cramerism).

This turned out to be a long post, so I'll discuss my new MFI purchases in a separate entry.