Wednesday, March 21, 2007

A couple of notes

Not long ago, I noted that CTRP had looked cheap. It had peaked at ~$74 and dropped to the mid-$50s. I picked up a few extra shares at ~$57. It's now back up to ~$67 just a few weeks later.

Similarly, PAY looks like it may be cheap right now. It peaked at ~$42, backed off to ~$35, and now has gone back up $2 to ~$37. At it's highest, it had gained 40% since I first bought LPMA, at its lowest in the last few days, it was up only 20%. Also, the chart indicators that I learned about in Phil Town's Rule #1 look quite good for PAY right now. I don't have extra cash lying around, but if I did, I'd think seriously about an extra investment in PAY.

WNR is up ~40% in the last month. It announced great earnings 1 March. It seems to me that this is probably because of higher prices for oil; they discussed better margins, but also higher operating costs. It's also due to better refinery throughput. I really liked how positive the CEO sounded about '07, especially Q1. Apparently, so did a lot of other people.

On the other hand, VPHM has plumetted since their peak mid-February. Q4 earnings were down a bit, but 2006 was a stronger year than 2005. Now they announced the sale of senior convertable notes, and the stock price gapped a little lower.

Just to update - my total IRR is 23.3%. My MFI portfolio has an IRR of 40.8%. (In a recent post, I said that it was something like 11% - I just realized that I had accidentally excluded GVHR; so the 11% IRR was wrong. It's not that the IRR jumped 30%!) The IRR of my Motley Fool portfolio is 60.8%. With PAY down a bunch from its high, the IRR of my special situations portfolio is 63%. So, the kicker from my recent post about investing in biotech is that the IRR for my biotech portfolio is -5.8%. This has put me one step closer to revising my opinion of investing in biotech at all.

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