My top 5-ish positions remain the same: GTE, BRK, OXY, GLW, NOK, CHME, GPOR.
I have spent some time looking more in depth at GLW and discussing it with other people. The biggest question is long term situation with LCD business. If LCDs get commoditized and margins significantly drop, GLW could lose a significant part of sales and income. The likely scenario is that future growth in LCDs will come from low cost, lowish quality uses in developing countries. In other words the growth will be from bottom tier that is subject to Chinese manufacturing competition. GLW will counter with great R&D and perhaps new product categories. The company has always had great businesses and transitions to new high-margin products. Its issues were mostly lawsuits and not losses from bad business decisions. So there is a chance that it will handle future LCD transition pretty well. Company has a great balance sheet and its joint ventures are well capitalized as well. That's a huge advantage here.
The stock was an obvious buy at the bottom, but less so here. I should not be posting my thoughts one day before earnings announcement that is likely to move the stock up or down by double digit percentage. :) However, I don't think that last quarter matters a lot. It obviously was bad. The question really is the long term competitiveness of LCD business and possible future businesses.
In terms of buys and sells recently, I have not bought much. I have trouble chasing stocks up here and my cash position is still pretty low (about 10% of assets), so I don't really need to buy here.
I got rid of remaining IR position possibly way too low. I sold my remaining bit of WSC and I'm holding only BRK now. I decided not to buy LUK, since it is quite opaque, so it is a faith investment. I am trying not to get into faith investments that much nowadays. ;) I bought tiny position in UL and added a tiny bit of JNJ. |
