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Strategies & Market Trends : Value Investing -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Paul Senior who wrote (9427)	12/27/1999 9:57:00 PM
From: Ken Ludwig	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 78536

Paul, I find myself agreeing with those in the patch who think that seismic companies will lag even the most lagging laggards because there is so much unexplored seismic reporting out there. Value plays require us to invest early but this could be ridiculous. A year from now might be time. If SEI has interests in production that might be reason enough to put money here as kind of an overlooked "backdoor" into the coming boom in E&P stocks.

To: Paul Senior who wrote (9427)	12/27/1999 11:35:00 PM
From: Paul Senior	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 78536

Thread, to bring us into the popular telecom. arena, I bring to your attention a value stock more of the GARP class or relative value class. That stock is: ECI Communications, ECIL stocksheet.com Revs moving up every year since '93. EPS increasing too. Relatively little LTD. In the past several years ECIL has been a consistent 20%+ ROE'r. Trailing P/E is 27, but with forward P/E of 13. Some negatives: 1) An Israeli stock. With all that political risk and accounting, finance, business differences. 2) An analyst who has said the stock suffers because they have no business presence in the US. 3) Stock has already moved up in past few sessions from 24 to about 30. Some positives: 1.) ECIL is almost a $1B dollar (in sales) company with 4000 employees. If there is a contingent of employees working on new technology - and with 4000 employees in a tech business, I know there is- so there is a possibility that some successes could lead to spinoffs or subsidiaries that could catch investors' fancy. At least one manufacturing operation is being outsourced to SCI Systems. I conclude from this that that ECIL is focusing on its core strength (which I assume is technology development). 2) A security/firewall corp. spinoff has been announced. 3) 30% of the company is owned by another Israeli company, KOR. KOR is controlled by a member of the Bronfman family. The Bronfmans are well known, successful Canadian investors. KOR purchased over 1M shares of ECIL for $37/sh in mid '99 (I'm reporting this from memory- may have facts slightly wrong here). ECIL buyers now ($30+ per sh) get stock cheaper than the Bronfmans' KOR last purchase. Seems to me ECIL offers a growing business at a reasonable price when compared to its financials and to its peer companies. Plus there is chance for some very good extra price appreciation if ECIL technologists or marketeers can deliver some good products. I'm nibbling at current price. FWIW.

To: Paul Senior who wrote (9427)	2/2/2000 7:46:00 PM
From: Archie Meeties	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 78536

Paul, Nice find on THX - it should do well no matter what. If no bids at the target price by the deadline, and the share price weakens out of disappointment, it would become significantly undervalued. You mentioned a while back that you would take another look at SEI if it moved. Any current thoughts? ie., anything holding you back? The IPO of DDD is imminent, no? In this current energy climate it should do well. (The Vicksburg discoveries don't hurt either).