I am often struck by the fact that, when it comes to companies, size is no guarantee of quality. By which I mean that generally speaking I have no bias in favor of large or small cap companies, and frequently I see a symbiosis of small companies serving the large ones like the pilot fish […]
I am one of the no doubt very few people in the world who enjoy watching the Federal Reserve Chair testifying before Congress. Among the issues presented in the latest round from Chair Yellen was the difficulty of old people coping with the low interest rate environment in living off their investment income. The Chair, […]
Banks are sometimes difficult to get a handle on; the Citigroup 10-K for fiscal year 2007 was over 200 pages long and you could have read every word of it and not found a line reading “Oh, by the way, we’re doomed.” But not every bank is a too-big-to-fail megabank that dabbles in derivatives; the […]
Skywest (SKYW), a provider of regional flight services mainly to United Continental and Delta Airlines , has a balance sheet that I would describe as very interesting. The company literally has enough cash and securities on hand to buy back more than 80% of its shares. Skywest has a market cap of $793 million as […]
Whenever I’m in a store it always strikes me that every product on sale there, even the small and unusual ones, are produced by some fairly large and serious corporations that employ thousands of people and do millions in business. One such company is ACCO Brands Corp., which makes office supplies, laminators, shredders, and notebooks […]
I have long been attracted to companies with a high level of free cash flow, and I have found that telephone companies have been a fruitful place to look, as the companies combine a cash flow orientation with a recurrent source of income. And I think cable companies may have similar investment characteristics. There is […]
As you may know, a few weeks ago Dell reported remarkably disappointing earnings of 43 cents a share on a comparable basis versus 55 cents in the year-ago quarter, which caused the price to decline sharply. In my view, taking DELL’s substantial cash position into account and even allowing these bad results to be indicative […]
M & F Worldwide is a company that has come across my screens many times in the past, but I never could bring myself to write about it. The company was taken private last September by the well-known takeover artist Ron Perelman, and unfortunately for me, I’m not on record as saying it is an […]
Investment Technology Group (ITG) is in an interesting situation; the company primarily operates a trading platform and provides brokerage services, as well as providing investment research. As you may know, trading volumes have been low for the last few years, never having reclaimed the peak levels of 2008. This has naturally affected ITG’s earnings and […]
In my last article discussing Black Box, part of my positive opinion of the company was its performance in 2009. This led me to consider how far back into a company’s earnings history we should go. Ben Graham in his Security Analysis recommends at least a decade, but that runs into the situation that a […]