Wine is terroir
I had the pleasure of meeting Arnold Waldstein Tuesday evening at his local watering hole, Terroir. Nice place; don’t let the current iteration of their website throw you off. It was the first time I’d seen a bar have Riesling on tap, but I ended up having some Greek red, the name of which I forgot a few seconds after the barmaid mentioned it.
In addition to being a wine aficionado, Arnold is an expert on the social web and an experienced business and marketing consultant. He’s also a crackerjack writer. Worth checking out his blog for thoughts on wine; the intersection of technology, business, and the web; and occasional thoughts on other topics.
Dry powder
Tim Knight’s posts Wednesday evening (A Harrowing Session; Resilience) were only the latest examples of a veteran market participant writing about how difficult the market has been over the last few months. Tim is primarily a short seller, but I’ve read similar laments by folks on the long side as well. To me, that’s a signal to continue holding some cash. Currently, I’m about 50% in cash.
Holding some cash has made it easier to stomach the big recent decline in AYSI, and it has given me some dry powder to add a few more shares at .90 earlier this week (I tried to buy a few more at .80 Tuesday, but the order didn’t fill for some reason).
Alloy Steel thoughts
It looks like I overestimated how much the company would earn this year. My mistake. I thought it would earn over 30 cents this fiscal year, but that appears to have been unrealistic given the capacity constraints the company mentioned in our call earlier this week. Nevertheless, the company has already earned 17.2 cents in the first three quarters of this year, better than the 14.9 cents it earned in its previous best year (2008).
My general idea regarding small growth companies is that if I can buy shares at a single digit multiple to a conservative estimate of what the company will earn next year, that’s probably a good deal (conversely, if I can’t, I may consider that a sell signal, as I did with DSNY last year).
Imagine that AYSI earns in all of 2011 what it has earned so far in the first three quarters of this fiscal year (17.2 cents). That seems like a conservative estimate to me (absent macro headwinds from China, I would expect the company to add to its 2010 earnings next quarter, and grow earnings by a modest amount or more next year). If you estimate that the company will earn ~17 cents next year, at its closing price Wednesday (84 cents), the company was trading for about 5x that forward earnings estimate. That seems like an attractive valuation to me, even given the current secular bear market. At the end of the secular bear market that followed the Great Depression, the average stock traded at about 7x (trailing) earnings. So I have a limit order in to buy a few more shares around this level. My current average cost is about 95 cents per share, which I may get to lower a little here.
A short idea on my watch list
ONP, a Chinese company Hesperian brought to my attention on Short Screen. As this is below $5 (the minimum price for shorting at my brokerage), I had hoped to take advantage of the up day Wednesday to buy a few puts on it, but I was disappointed to see that there aren’t any March expiration puts available for this one. Since overall market action will have some impact on the the performance of the underlying stock (and, hence, the options), I’d like to stagger out the maturities of puts I hold on stocks in lieu of shorting them. I sent an e-mail to my brokerage to see if they know if there will be March options available for ONP soon.
A failure to take profits
Several months back I sold out of BPT for a 100% profit (including dividends, over 3 years) and bought puts on it in lieu of shorting it. I am going to lose money on those puts, which are set to expire this month, for a simple reason: I failed to take profits on them. I remember my project manager Matt asking me if I planned to sell those puts when they had about doubled from where I bought them, and I told him I planned to hold them as I expected them to gain in value as BPT declined further. Fortunately, I made more on the sale of BPT than I’ll lose on my puts on it, but an expensive lesson nonetheless.
Better late than never
The pool at the farm finally opens for the summer today. I might get a good day or two’s use out of it. It’ll be good to soak my bones after the 7 mile run Wednesday evening.
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
