I also continued to ad to HES on Friday.
Today's Barron's has people who express positive opinions on some stocks that have been mentioned here, e.g. HES and your XRX. Favorable mentions too of SVU, INTC, MET, GM and others
Regarding HES:
online.barrons.com
"On April 30, Chairman and Chief Executive John B. Hess bought 48,000 shares of Hess (ticker: HES) for $2,496,082, an average of $52 each.
John Hess now directly holds 333,435 shares, a stake of less than a 1%. However, John Hess indirectly holds at least a 10% Hess stake through phantom shares and trusts." ...
"'This was definitely a notable trade,' says Lon Juricic, president of StreetInsider.com, noting John Hess' purchase of shares earlier in the year.
'He was a seller for a long time and recently started buying; he's a smart buyer. With any energy stock, you've got to watch oil prices and they've been coming in lately with a pretty big move," says Juricic. "That's a major consideration when playing this.'
On May 9, 2011, Hess shares reached an intraday 52-week high of $80.29, adjusted for dividends and splits. Shares slipped to a low of $46.66 on Oct. 4 and have recovered slightly since then, closing down 2.79 percent at $50.94 on Friday.
More recently, on April 25, Hess reported an inline first-quarter and forecast a weaker production outlook related to the Bakken shale in North Dakota. Hess had previously set a production goal of 60,000 barrels of oil per day at that location. In response, Credit Suisse analyst Edward Westlake downgraded Hess to Neutral from Outperform and cut the price target to $70 from $95."
Regarding SVU:
online.barrons.com
"Only two of 18 analysts recommend the stock, and more than 40% of its shares have been sold short. The stock was just ejected from the S&P 500. Its dividend yield of 6.3% implies some market fear that it might be cut, which is possible though not yet necessary.
Still, valued below five times current-year earnings, most of the challenges seem accounted for.
The company comfortably covers its debt service with cash flow for now. If a new value-pricing strategy—and a new head of retail operations hired last week—helps results, it would feed a relief rally.
Plan B would be a break-up to separate from the main supermarket unit the stable wholesale-distribution business and the strong Sav-A-Lot chain of independently owned deep-discount grocers, which by some estimates is alone worth Supervalu's share price. Analyst Ken Goldman, of JPMorgan, applies conservative discounts to comparable companies to arrive at a sum-of-the-parts value for the stock near $11." |
