Category — Stock Analysis

Berkshire’s latest 13-F reveals a new position of 2.9 million shares in Eaton Corp (ETN). This is a small stake when compared to Berkshires other purchases. As George from Fat Pitch Financials mentions, the question remains as to whether this is a Buffett pick or from a subsidiary.

Eaton is a company I had a brief look at in late 2007 when it was trading in the 80’s, I thought I’d take a quick review to see the status of the company today.

The October 27,2008 issue of Forbes lists the 200 best small companies of the US. These may be good companies, but I want to know whether they are good investments. So I’ve set up a new challenge.

My goal - go through each company and find the ones worthy of investment.

It’s 2am and you can’t sleep. You get up, go to the kitchen, grab a drink, turned on the T.V., flip through the channels and come across someone rotating their torso on the latest ab machine. You tell yourself to turn it off, but your brain is numb and hypnotized and you just keep watching those abs crunch..

24hr home shopping - that’s the name of the game for ValueVision Media Inc (VVTV), so grab yourself a cuppa because this analysis is going to take a while.

In part four of the series on special situations, I’ll briefly present a recent spinoff. Dr Pepper Snapple.

This series is based on the book You can be a stock market genius! so for additional information, be sure to read it yourself.

In May I wrote about K-Tron, a boring niche company that deals with material handling machines and crushing equipment. 3 months later, to my surprise and pleasure, the company has kept chugging along to new highs.

I’ve been looking into a company by the name of GeoEye after reading up on the very detailed and well written analysis by Chris Fernandez of Peak Stocks. If you are interested in small caps and don’t believe stock price volatility is a correlated indicator of business performance, then you can read more of his work by going here.

Before you read on, keep in mind that I am in the initial phases of poking around and nothing should be taken as granted. However, I plan to complete my research by August 22. Continue on to find out why.

Fiscal year 2008 came to a close for AeroGrow on March 31, 2008. The conference call was held on June 26 and I think it is a good time to provide an update.

Previously I had written about AeroGrow and pointed out good and bad points, but mostly good. With the stock price lower by approximately 35% from my time of purchase.In this post, I won’t gloss over the increase in revenue or store presence and other obvious matters. This post, I’ll be going over the problems.

For all value investors or those seeking to purchase $1 for 50c, I highly recommend you visit Value Investors Club. This is a site where people submit their best ideas once a year in order to gain or maintain their free membership. For those that just want to get some ideas, you can sign up for free to view valuations that were written 45 or 90 days prior.

Gone are the days where people wearing coats, gloves and nets in their hair, stood in a line counting/measuring and packaging nuts & bolts, grain, chemical, pills, food etc.

Nowadays, factories, companies, assembly lines all automate for precision and efficiency. How? With feeders,conveying systems and other related equipments handling bulk solids. I find the business boring don’t you? Yet, I am excited by this boredom.

Back in March, I wrote an analysis of the Aquila (ILA) & Great Plains (GXP) workout. Since then, the spread has been steadily closing. When I wrote the first post, the spread was at 21%. Today, that gap has closed to around 7%. Had you or I invested around that time, we would already be sitting on a nice gain of ~10% with very low risk.