Value investing and the pursuit of certainty

December 8, 2010

I first started dipping my toes into value investing in 2001, shortly after I had purchased my first index fund after reading “A Random Walk down Wall Street” by Malkiel. I had saved a modest sum, and wanted to create a nest egg so that I would be able to do what I wanted, rather […]

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ASCMA : A revised valuation

December 4, 2010

With the announced sale of assets to Encompass yesterday, ASCMA has divested the majority of its operating assets, its value becomes much easier to pin down compared to the opaque collection of assets before. (For my previous articles on ASCMA, please see here and here.) Of course, if the initial valuation wasn’t at least a […]

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ARRS valuation : Invest in demand for cable infrastructure

December 1, 2010

Arris (ARRS) is a leading maker of cable infrastructure equipment based in the United States. Major products include cable modems in subscriber homes, cable modem termination systems (CMTS) at the head-end needed to bridge RF/Ethernet signals from the cable modems onto the fiber-coaxial backbone of the network, and QAM tuners needed to transmit digital streams […]

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ASCMA review

November 27, 2010

Ascent Media (ASCMA) recently gained 15% on a single day, probably due to buying by some event-driven hedge fund, so I thought this would be an opportune time to be review the company and examine whether any changes to the valuation is appropriate. The immediate cause for the rise appears to be the purchase of […]

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Gold: To buy or not to buy

November 23, 2010

As the price of gold continues its ascent, and the world economic powers endeavor to outdo each other in printing fiat money, I find myself in a similar situation as value investors were in the late 1990s. Then, in the middle of the technological boom, value investors found that the stocks they cherished were spat […]

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Cardiac Science Merger (CSCX)

November 19, 2010

Sadly, CSCX has been taken over, or rather, taken-under, by an Indian company. Normally, the majority shareholders would object to such a take-under, but in this case, there is no dominant shareholder, and management stands to gain more from cashing in on their change of control agreements than hanging on. Both the board of directors […]

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Why the gold standard is bad

November 15, 2010

Yesterday, I read with amazement the James Grant op-ed in the New York Times advocating for a return to the gold standard. Why a publication as august as the New York Times allowed an op-ed which heaped undeserved abuse on Fed economists I do not understand. As a way of venting, I now list some […]

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Why the rise in gold is bad for the economy

November 13, 2010

At a time when central banks all over the world are pumping money into their economies, record amounts of cash are being sunk into a shiny hard rock. This rock cannot be consumed, has minimal industrial uses, and has negative cash flow due to storage and security costs. Nonetheless, gold serves as a currency of […]

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Portfolio turnover (CRWS, VCLK, TUC, Japan)

November 9, 2010

I have made some recent portfolio adjustments to rotate into more undervalued stocks. Specifically, I have liquidated my positions in CRWS and VCLK, which have nearly reached my target prices. Of course, as soon as I sold my VCLK shares, it rose another 10%. But then again, VCLK has already risen more than 25% off […]

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Mac-Gray : Steady profits in Laundry (TUC)

November 3, 2010

Mac-Gray (TUC) is a company that will do okay in a deflationary environment, and even better in an inflationary one. It is the nation’s second largest laundry facilities management company, second to Coinmach, a private company. The business is predictable and easily understandable. A typical laundry facilities lease runs for seven to eight years, and […]

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